Case study · Retail & food

Haymes Paint: a vibrant new digital home for an Australian paint icon.

Haymes Paint has been made in Australia since 1935. When a period of rapid growth arrived, the brand needed a website that served retail customers, trade painters and specifiers equally well, and turned that engagement into sales.

Sector: Retail & food
Service: Website design and development
Channels: Website

Website projectDigital experience

The challenge

What needed to change.

Haymes Paint is the country’s largest Australian owned and Australian made paint brand. In 2019/20 the company embarked on an ambitious growth strategy, establishing a franchise group, opening six new Melbourne metro stores and adding further store acquisitions and openings.

The multi-faceted website needed wide ranging changes to meet those growth targets. It had to serve retail customers, trade and specifiers, each with different needs, and it had to deliver better customer engagement and increased sales to match the new corporate ambitions. Giving a famous paint brand a new website design is a bold idea, and it needed to be done properly.

Approach

How the work took shape.

To meet the growth targets and make the user experience more enjoyable and efficient, we knew the changes had to be wide ranging rather than cosmetic. The first decision was about platform. To realise the new corporate ambitions, we scoped and defined a suitable customer engagement platform, and Oracle was the final choice.

The second decision was about people. The redesign had to consider each of the Haymes Paint customer segments, retail, trade and specifiers, so that every user experience was covered rather than designing for one and hoping the others followed.

The realignment of the brand’s focus, and the energy behind it, was carried through every stage of the work: the information architecture, wireframe prototyping, the visual concept and the design itself.

Because the website runs on several Oracle modules, a great deal of the design effort went into making the transition between them feel like one continuous experience, so a customer moving from exploring colours to browsing products never senses a join.

Colour is the heart of the brand, so the design gave it room. The colour exploration pages and the colours mega menu were treated as destinations in their own right rather than utilities, and every page was designed for desktop and mobile from the outset.

The shift

Designing for retail, trade and specifiers at once meant no customer had to work around the others.

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The work

The work, up close.

More than 50 pages were specially designed for both desktop and mobile. The result is a website that gives customers the chance to explore colours, browse the quality products and find inspiration, whichever segment they belong to and whichever device they arrive on.

The focus since launch has stayed on additional improvements and refining elements that add value, to ensure the best interactive and responsive outcomes as the brand keeps growing.

Colour Planet is where the brand comes alive. The explore colours page presents swatch cards that let a customer wander through colour families the way they would in a store, and the colours mega menu puts colour families and services one click from any page. It is the part of the website built for inspiration rather than transactions, and it is designed to be lingered over.

The products side is built for speed. The products mega menu lays out categories and ranges so trade customers and specifiers can get to the right product fast, and the products listing page adds category filters for narrowing the range. The numbers show the redesign working across the board.