Imperial Headwear – E-Commerce Development

Since its inception in 1916, Imperial Sports has made—and continues to make—the best fitting golf hats. It was time for an E-Commerce Development.

“It’s not every day that you get to work with a 100-year-old golf brand and develop its first eCommerce presence.” -Brent Feldman

Our Task – E-Commerce Development

Imperial Sports initially came to us looking for website updates and they wanted to add e-commerce capabilities to their business-to-business (B2B) website. Soon after, their president decided that Imperial should be going after consumers in a business-to-consumer (B2C) context. That said, we shifted our focus from a B2B site to a B2C one.

Our Strategy

A consumer-facing site for Imperial Sports would be a first for this historic brand, which has been around for almost 100 years. Not only did they want to add e-commerce capabilities to their B2B site, but they wanted to enter the B2C market by building a consumer-facing site to enhance their wholesale offering.

Imperial is all about the finer things in life. The back nine at dusk. Cool breeze on a warm night. Relaxing with friends at the beach. Backyard oyster roasts in the fall. Saturday tailgating done right. We believe life is a series of moments and you better be ready for them. Our mission is to prepare you for endless opportunity by providing style and comfort. -From the Imperial B2C site

The Design Details

While the main goal for the Imperial site was to move it to WordPress and create an online presence for shopping, the design team worked on a few modifications to the homepage and landing pages that would make the site more visually appealing.

Originally, the site included mostly product photography. For the new site we requested imagery of the product being used by people. This helped add more warmth to the site and create a focus on people that hadn’t been there before. We also updated the fonts, pairing a clean, legible sans serif, with a new script that portrayed an heritage of the brand.

The shop landing page was updated to show a grid of products with text over the images, giving users a visually interesting branching off point to explore products and see everything that Imperial has to offer. We also made an addition to the homepage–to include the latest Instagram posts that would keep the homepage fresh and current.

The Development Details

Our development team had the main task of converting the site from ExpressionEngine to WordPress. Because of this change, the client can now have more flexibility in maintaining their site, which we also built to be fully responsive. We also added WooCommerce to the site to handle the shopping cart and e-commerce capabilities for the site.

Showcasing the product lines, especially the new CoolCore line, was a crucial task for us. To accomplish this, we built two grid pages to highlight these products. As products frequently change with seasons and new offerings, we made sure to build these pages so that the site managers would have a large amount of control in the editing the page.

This site also integrates with their in house ERP system which doesn’t have an accessible API. This presented an interesting challenge that we were able to overcome to help update inventory, pricing and customer info on a regular and timely basis.

The Results

• Matchbox Design Group helped Imperial hit 25% of their annual sales goal in the first month of launching.
  We successfully introduced a new product line extension, CoolCore, into the market.

Visit the Imperial Sports website. A new E-Commerce Development designed by Matchbox Design Group.

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