Elevate - An Experience Design Firm

An Introduction to Elevate

We believe a well-crafted digital experience has the power to transform a brand. Elevate focuses on your users first, addressing

their wants and needs, to create an optimal customer experience that has the ability to inspire loyalty and grow your business.

We optimize user journeys. Our engagements can range from the creation of an entirely new website experience for your brand

to the analysis of a single key page in order to improve a specific metric.

For over a decade, we have worked with leading style brands in the apparel and beauty categories, combining user and industry

research to strengthen their brand experiences.

How We Work

Elevate takes a pragmatic approach to interactive design, combining years of experience and best-practice knowledge with a sensitive approach to each client’s brand

expertise. The idea behind our process is simple — information and collaboration create effective results.

A few of our distinguished clients include: Redken 5th Ave NYC, Lancôme, Hanes, Champion, Maidenform, and Trunk

Club.

Elevate - Case Stories

As part of Elevate’s digital AOR partnership with Hanesbrands Direct-to-Consumer division, they enlisted us to solve a few problems with their primary Ecommerce site,

OneHanesPlace.com. Product merchandising and basic user interaction issues were at the top of the list coupled with the added challenge of redesigning the site in a rolling,

yet systematic approach.

Our user-experience and visual-design teams went to work mapping current customer interactions against industry best practices and site analytics to identify a number of

significant changes.

The home page was redesigned to better reflect the various Hanes brands sold on the site to provide the various brand-marketing teams more promotional space. The product

pages were also restructured to merchandise the products better and to create a more seamless flow of the shopping process. Additionally, our various teams led discussions

with a number of third-party vendors to implement new technologies into the site, including Bazaarvoice and Adobe Scene7.

Every discipline within Elevate worked closely with the Hanes internal IT group, and in particular, our front-end development team took lead on programming all front-end

presentation layer code to ensure proper integration with Hanes’ Ecommerce platform,IBM WebSphere,

Hanes DTC named Elevate as its digital agency of record in May, 2014.

The global marketing group for Redken and Pureology, two leading professional haircare lines under the L’Oréal masterbrand, engaged Elevate to redesign

the international presence of its flagship Redken and Pureology sites across 27 countries. Their objective was clear: provide the global marketing team

opportunities to engage consumers and hairdressers in a modern and inspiring way, while ensuring the experience can scale based on the size of each country’s team and budget.

An extensive content audit, coupled with a deep user experience analysis surfaced various tasks that a site visitor was expected to perform. This subsequently informed how the various interface elements were designed and the way each product line was visually merchandised.

Our front-end development team created custom content templates that were connected to a selected content- management system. We worked very

closely with L’Oréal’s IT group and their external back-end development partner, leading biweekly status meetings through the rolling launch of sites across the various countries.

As the sites launched over several months, we continued to support the Redken global team as they released new product lines as well as preparing a 360° social-marketing dossier. This document provided a set of guidelines for each country to re-activate stagnant social marketing programs or enhance existing

programs with relevant strategic and tactical advice.

“ I have been working with Elevate for the last 8 years and they are my favorite agency to work with. Their design work is absolutely gorgeous. They

consistently deliver on-time and on-budget. Not to mention, our account’s management is one of the best I have experienced. If you’re looking for a web-

agency, I highly recommend Elevate.” Sarah Liang-Kress

AVP of Ecommerce & Digital Strategy, L’Oréal USA

Connections Academy is a tuition-free, full-time, online public school that offers uniquely individualized learning programs in virtual classrooms to more than

60,000 students.

The Connections Academy site had been focusing on providing families with program information and helping them to begin the enrollment process. How

could it be made more effective, leading to an increase in the number of applicants who actually finish the process and attend classes?

The principle seems simple: The more a family engages with Connections Academy, the more likely it is that their child will complete the enrollment and

become a student. A family who engages with the Connections Academy brand on three occasions (online or at an event) is two times more likely to complete

enrollment than a family who interacts with the brand only once before beginning the enrollment process. Educating families about the program and building a

relationship with them should be as high of a priority as initiating the enrollment process. These relationships lead to informed families and students who are

more likely to become members of the Connections community.

In order to encourage families to further interact with the program and its community, the main actions a visitor could take (contacting a parent or teacher,

finding a local event, attending a live online information session, or requesting a program guide to share with their family) were turned into visually prominent modules that could be placed on any relevant page. This structure allows Connections Academy to easily perform A/B testing to find the most successful and

relevant placement for this content. This flexible modular system also gives Connections Academy the ability to quickly create tailored sites for each school in

their program.

To make sure all the site’s information is of value to prospective families, we audited all of the existing content to minimize repetition and to identify any

additional content needs. A new sitemap and content matrix were created to ensure that all the content was easily discoverable and that cross-linking would

prevent any dead-ends for site visitors.

www.ConnectionsAcademy.com

“ We’ve worked with Elevate on many successful projects, but this [redesign] was by far the largest and most complex. The team is truly an

extension of our in-house group taking the time to thoroughly understand the business drivers and researching the consumer needs to set the

project up for success. The site is proving to be very successful in the heart of our busiest season.” Heather Ryan

Senior Director, Web and Direct Marketing at Connections Education, a division of Pearson

Elevate was engaged by Mario Tricoci, Chicago’s leading salon and day spa, to redesign its Ecommerce site and provide a more cohesive guest experience.

Re-architected from the ground up, the new site provides additional opportunities for the client marketing team to promote new spa and salon services and drive consumer

traffic into the salon through a salon-finding tool and an appointment-booking application.

Elevate developed a complex technical infrastructure to link various legacy back-end database and point-of-sale systems, all without disrupting business operations at the

corporate and salon levels during the site’s build and launch.

Additionally, a robust content management system was developed to allow the client to easily update the site without technical intervention. Teams were given the technology

to create special offers, add product and service offerings and modify individual salon information.

The new site has been a tremendous success for Mario Tricoci, with a 38% increase in gift certificate sales for a particular annual promotion when compared to the initial site.

They also attributed a more than 20% increase in year-over-year revenue to the new site.

www.tricoci.com

Mario Tricoci - Complex Technology Integration

The technology challenges with the redesign were very complex, involving integrating old (and unchangeable) databases, new gift-card processing and

appointment-booking services along with a point-of-sale system that was newly installed across their collections of salons.

Our solution had to be powerful, yet flexible enough to work with these existing and new systems. The public-facing website (1) connected via Simple Object

Access Protocol (SOAP) to a legacy third-party database (2) as well as the client’s web-based point-of-sale and booking system (3), which is used in the front

offices of all MarioTricoci salons (7).

Elevate developed a middleware layer to handle various data communication points between all of the various business services, such as delivery through

FedEx (5) as well as Mario Tricoci’s credit card transaction processor (6). It also had to maintain order history and shipping information for the fulfillment

center (4).

Elevate also developed a custom help-desk application for use by the fulfillment center, which used many of the same integrations as the public-facing web

site.

Elevate An Experience Design Firm 328 S. Jefferson St, Suite 540 Chicago, IL 60661 (312) 932-1104