Designing the Luxury Jewellery Shopping Experience

How can we continue delivering excellent experiences as we grow and evolve our retail channels?

Client:
Luxury Jewellery
Sector:
Retail
Project Type:
Service Design
Services:
Qualitative Research
Journey Mapping & Service Blueprinting
Process Improvement
Collaborators:
N/A
The Challenge

Unparalleled in the luxury jewelry space, our client is on a mission to deliver a seamless and joyful experience, regardless of the channel their customers are shopping in. They engaged Made Manifest in a high priority project to drive updates to foundational retail capabilities.

Our Response

Working hand-in-hand with the team, Made Manifest delivered an in-depth understanding of what aspects of the retail experience were working and areas for improvement; defining new requirements, insights, and workstreams to ensure their customers continued to love the shopping experience.

Client:
Luxury Jewellery
Sector:
Retail
Project Type:
Service Design
Services:
Qualitative Research
Journey Mapping & Service Blueprinting
Process Improvement
Collaborators:
N/A
Client:
Luxury Jewellery
Client Sector:
Retail
Project Type:
Service Design
Services:
Qualitative Research
Journey Mapping & Service Blueprinting
Process Improvement
Collaborators:
N/A
The Challenge

Unparalleled in the luxury jewelry space, our client is on a mission to deliver a seamless and joyful experience, regardless of the channel their customers are shopping in. They engaged Made Manifest in a high priority project to drive updates to foundational retail capabilities.

Our Response

Working hand-in-hand with the team, Made Manifest delivered an in-depth understanding of what aspects of the retail experience were working and areas for improvement; defining new requirements, insights, and workstreams to ensure their customers continued to love the shopping experience.

Linn and Seden were concise but extremely thorough. I felt confident with you both representing us to our customers and employees
Group Product Manager
The Opportunity

Our client is on a mission to redefine luxury through their sustainable, ethically sourced fine jewelry for everyday use. Founded in 2015, our luxury jewellery client aims to celebrate women and empower them with fine jewellery for every day. 

They have sold over a million pieces of jewelry, with an estimated annual revenue of $162.2 million and an impressive 40% repeat purchase rate.

A pioneer in the Direct to Consumer (D2C) space, the client experienced rapid growth and amazing success through their e-commerce strategy, eventually expanding to open their first retail store in 2019. With rapid expansion and scaling of their in-person retail stores, the time was right to look deeper at their retail experience from an omnichannel perspective to identify how to continue delivering on their client’s expectations. In particular, the retail operations were bumping into limitations with the technology stack in place, and looked to update core technology platforms such as their point-of-sale (POS) system. 

In addition, the team wanted to understand the requirements from a customer and staff experience perspective to ensure the choice of POS and key infrastructure upgrades would be fit for purpose and enable them to continue to deliver on their brand promise of a best-in-class luxury jewelry experience. 

hands reaching with pretty rings on
Our Approach

The Made Manifest team approached this challenge using our service design toolset to gain a current-state, 360-degree view of retail operations and customer experience across e-commerce and in-person channels. We were able to embed with the team, and leverage the organization's nimble and vertically-integrated operations to move quickly without sacrificing depth and nuance. 

In-context observations for both customer-facing and backstage retail store operations allowed us to document firsthand the challenges with the current technology systems, and how they were impacting both operational efficiency and customer experience. 

In-depth interviews with internal stakeholders across Technology, Engineering, Retail, Data, Customer Happiness, and Inventory teams, as well as Retail managers, stylists and operations created a deep understanding of the backstage processes and pain-points. 

Customer interviews combined with in-store intercepts helped us gather a mix of insights that uncovered in-context customer behaviors and reported expectations and preferences. 

We developed service blueprints and customer journey maps to visualize and explore the retail experience from a front and backstage lens, while documenting opportunities for improvement. These informed detailed product and technology team backlogs, as well as set the foundation for several future projects and workstreams.

Loved the visualized journey map with the customer highs and lows. Unearthing the inventory insight had a great cross-functional impact + is driving current discussion
Senior Director, Product and Service Design
Project Outcomes

The service blueprinting work identified five new work streams with assigned cross functional owners and timelines that were needed to deliver a best-in-class customer experience. Our engagement helped validate existing requirements and identified several new requirements for the updated POS system, supporting the team in deciding the most appropriate POS for the upgrade. 

The customer ‘modes’ helped distill patterns in customer behavior, preferences and brand perception, which supported ongoing retail visioning work, input to retail staff training, and to inform updated retail store designs. 

Engaging in customer research and inviting customers to share their perspective gave them already loyal and vocal fans another channel for engaging with the brand. 

Having seen the value of working in this way, our client hired their first in-house service design shortly after the conclusion of this project, with Made Manifest providing guidance on the job description and supporting outreach to our networks. 

The Made Manifest team was asked to continue work on further areas of service design research, blueprinting, requirements gathering and customer insight.

25
global retail stores
36
retail ops pain points
8
hours in store observation

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