White Hot Hair

White Hot Hair is an independent UK based hair care brand established in 2013, specialising in natural grey hair, formerly operating on Magento 2

Client Link

whitehothair.co.uk

Services Used

BACKGROUND.

Due to the desire of wanting more in-house control of their site and to avoid the complexities and additional maintenance costs in keeping their Magento environment up to date, the decision was made to move to a more user centric platform.

Because Shopify is a Software as a Service platform (SaaS), this means the client is not responsible for maintenance and compliance, since this is undertaken by the platform itself. This means the client could use their budget to concentrate on improving sales, customer retention and a more streamlined user experience.

BRIEF.

White Hot Hair has been a client of Absolute since 2022, although we didn’t build their original Magento site, we’ve supported them in implementing improvements to site security and performance.

Because of the level of Magento support required, White Hot Hair approached us to inquire about the feasibility of migrating to Shopify and if it would be a good fit for the business within their present and future plans. They were struggling to see the continued benefits of Magento, since they had limited third party integrations and little in the way of extended functionality. Migrating to Shopify also meant they would no longer incur the costs of hosting the site, because this also falls within a monthly Shopify plan.

Absolute undertook a review of their Magento site to ensure the current functionality and capabilities of the site could be smoothly transitioned into Shopify. There were a few features which weren’t available “out of the box” within Shopify but we assisted with custom development and finding comparable apps within the Shopify store to support these.

HOW WE HELPED.

Starting with a discovery phase, we began with a review of the White Hot Hair’s existing Magento 2 site, reviewing key features and functionality to ensure they could be transferred to the Shopify platform.

Where compatibility was an issue, we provided guidance on alternative solutions and Shopify apps to make certain that there was little change in the day-to-day business processes while ensuring we meet and in some cases exceed the client’s requirements.

Following the Magento 2 discovery, we collaboratively worked with White Hot Hair to understand their vision for the new Shopify site so we could then select a few themes which we thought would be best fit, with feature rich functionality and a good base for the business to continue to expand in the future.

However, having presented a selection of themes during a meeting, White Hot Hair felt they were a bit too “out of the box” and generic - they preferred to take the route of bespoke UX and a more tailored layout to ensure the design stood out in their sector. With the feedback from White Hot Hair and based on an existing theme for most of the ‘heavy lifting’, we asked our creative team to create a layout which was more aligned with the client’s vision - this included making bespoke changes to the homepage, content page and product pages.

After a few revisions of the bespoke designs we then signed off on the design stage and moved over to site development. Our in-house developers at Absolute built the site from vision to reality, ensuring at each stage that we took the time to review the built pages against the design for consistency.

Migrating product, customer and order data from Magento to Shopify was a large aspect of the project as the client wanted to ensure continuity and that they wouldn’t lose any critical business and sales data.

The migration scope also included copying over custom attributes and product filters to help the customer find the right product for them.

Due to Magento’s default resolution of product images being smaller than Shopify, during product migration we found that images were overly stretched and didn’t display the individual products in an optimal way. White Hot Hair then went through an exercise to improve image quality to make them all a lot more eye-catching and professional across the new site.

Preserving search engine ranking for existing products and pages was also a high priority, we undertook SEO continuity (301 redirects) and also completed site testing so we could confirm that all content, product and other vital data was mapped to the correct location on the new Shopify site.