The brief

De Beers needed help with creating and promoting a microsite, redesigned e-commerce templates and social media animated graphics, so enlisted the expertise of our digital team.

One of the main elements of our brief involved creating a microsite for a major event that De Beers was holding - its annual press day in Paris for the international media. The site needed to fit within De Beers’ brand guidelines and reflect the company’s opulent brand look and feel.

We were also tasked with redesigning the customer experience for several key pages within De Beers’ new Magento e-commerce system. Our work involved creating a seamless customer journey and better positioning the website pages that feature the 1888 Master Diamonds, De Beers’ most sought-after and highest value collection.

Our team also redesigned and built all of the customer touchpoints that proceed all of De Beers’ online purchases and data capture forms. This involved us redesigning the digital communication emails that are generated when customers make a purchase, sign up to De Beers’ newsletter or reach a 404 page. The changes we made had to be applied to all versions of the website, which involved us working across three different versions of the site.

Key challenges

The main challenges we faced included:

• As the De Beers brand is so established and world-renowned, we had work within the limitations of the brand guidelines, while also making sure that our work pushed the boundaries and made the overall user experience more engaging and enjoyable
• The press day microsite had to incorporate third party image-sharing tools so that the world’s media could quickly access the information they needed. We worked with third party APIs to make sure the integration was seamless and the site did the job it was designed to do

Our approach

• We started out by carrying out an in-depth stakeholder exercise – this enabled us to evaluate De Beers’ web users’ needs
• We then used these findings to plan our website templates and the areas we needed to amend and refine
• Our team of digital specialists designed and delivered a prototype walkthrough of the new website. This enabled De Beers to visualise how the new website would look and function. It also helped make sure that what we’d created was within the client’s strict brand guidelines
• Our technical teams worked closely with De Beers’ IT department and the third party image-sharing business to make sure the microsite worked perfectly for the world’s press

Results

• We’ve continued to implement the press day microsite on an annual basis. This has involved us keeping it regularly updated so that it reflects De Beers’ current brand movements
• The new templates that we designed for the e-commerce solution have been implemented by De Beers’ technical team. They’re also being used as part of their wider e-commerce solution
• Our design materials were used in a Christmas promotion that ran across all of De Beers’ social media activity. We’ve created several GIFs off the back of an animated video too
• The website user templates we designed for the various different customer touchpoints are being extensively used