Case Study – StickaStyle

Posted by Jay on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 2:36 pm

The Jigowatt office has been sporting the StickaStyle stickers on it’s walls for the past few months, transforming our plain decor into a bright and vibrant junglescape complete with Monkeys, Parrots and Leopards! So it’s fantastic to finally announce the launch of the brand new StickaStyle web site which went live this Monday the 19th of October 2009!

StickaStyle is a fresh business venture set up early in 2009 with a really cool product – highly detailed, high quality removable and re-stickable wall stickers for childrens bedrooms and playrooms. Stickastyle is initially a solely online business so the owners decided early on that they needed an extremely solid, reliable and feature rich eCommerce platform… Of course the package of choice is Magento and Jigowatt were commissioned to design and build the web site.

But before any web site building could take place we had to create a fresh brand identity for StickaStyle, one which represented the companies fun product whilst still being professional. This process was made easier for us as the client had already produced some solid logo mockups which we felt worked well, and with some magic touches would have great longevity and provide the perfect look and feel. Obviously StickaStyle is all about stickers so it makes sense that the logo itself is represented in sticker form.

Jigowatt’s approach to our new venture has been absolutely first-class.

One of the unique selling points of the StickaStyle product is the fact that these stickers can actually be safely removed and re-stuck on other walls/furniture, numerous times without damaging the product. This was something we wanted to put across in the logo which we achieved by making the “sticker” peel at the corner. We chose a friendly rounded font and rounded off all of the corners which gives the logo and approachable yet professional feel. As with all of our identity projects we were certain to make sure that the logo would perform well in different media at different sizes and in black & white. Below is the final result:

With the identity completed we could sink our teeth into a brand new Magento installation. StickaStyle were keen to spend their budget wisely so we recommended taking the popular Modern theme and adjusting it using the wonders of CSS to reskin the key elements and give them a unique look and feel. This turns out to be a much more cost effective solution and we feel that the final result is still far enough removed from the original theme to give the web site it’s own identity.

An example of the StickaStyle styling

For the design of the site we really wanted to focus on the stickers themselves and took inspiration from the stickers on our own office walls. We created a room-scape complete with wooden flooring, coving and light switches over which we laid transparent montages of the stickers. To make it a little more interesting we also used a randomising script to make the sticker collection change upon each page reload.

With the basic look and feel of the theme decided we set about refining the site functionality which in the end included making some heavy modifications to the Modern theme. Firstly the catalog pages were altered to include larger thumbnails and display permanently in “list view” which gives a better over view of the products themselves which we felt worked with this small quantity. We also made large adjustments to the product details page – taking our room-scape theme and placing a large image of the product at the center of attention whilst removing the rotating background stickers to avoid any confusion. These individual product pages also pull in random testimonials which leads us to the final part of the site creation process; wordpress integration.

Their creative flair has brought the product to life through the site they’ve built for us.

Magento doesn’t come with a very good news system built in so we decided to integrate our CMS of choice; WordPress. Besides the products themselves the dynamic content was to include news articles and the aforementioned testimonials, both of which needed to be easily added, edited and configured by the client. Integrating WordPress with Magento is a fairly smooth procedure and provides the client with 2 separate log ins, one for the shop and one for the dynamic content. With WordPress set up we went about getting Magento and WordPress to talk to each other which you can see instances of on the homepage and product details pages. On the homepage the latest news is pulled from WordPress and on the individual product pages random testimonials are retrieved from the WordPress database and displayed randomly on each page refresh.

Finally we went through the standard procedures of setting up a Magento store; creating branded customer emails, tabled shipping rates including free postage to the UK and all of the relevant cross-sells and up-sells etc.

In the end StickaStyle were provided with a high quality web site packed with features, flexible and expandable at a very affordable price. It was great fun for us to work on more of a ’boutique’ online store with a limited number of products which really allowed us to really elaborate the products themselves and produce what we would consider to be a fantastic web site!

Visit StickaStyle.co.uk.

Testimonial

Jigowatt’s approach to our new venture has been absolutely first-class.
They took the time to fully understand the product and our vision for Stickastyle, and helped guide us though every step of the journey. Throughout, Jigowatt were hugely consultative, ultra-flexible, and totally committed to making the site as user-friendly as possible. Their creative flair has brought the product to life through the site they’ve built for us.
I can’t recommend these guys highly enough. Thank you Jigowatt.

Jessica Watling – MD of Stickastyle

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