Heritor is the flagship luxury watch brand for Resultco, a West Bloomfield-based watch marketer and distributor. The pre-existing Heritor website was a very weird, 50% gray abomination of 80’s glamor shots and racing memorabilia. I scrapped all of that in favor of a simple, minimal website with an aspirational mountaineering theme.
This was one of my first projects at Resultco, and I was given wide latitude to use whatever imagery might fit. The interesting part about the market positioning of Heritor is that it’s a B2B business masquerading as a B2C. Resultco does most of its business wholesale with deal sites like Groupon and WatchGang, so the website was made to appeal to businesses by appearing to appeal to consumers. Not that it didn’t appeal to consumers in the end, but that was a product of good design, not the marketing plan, necessarily. The goal was to make a site that showed that people would buy these watches so that deal sites would sell them. It led to some unorthodox decisions in marketing and design.
Luxury fashion is an interesting space in terms of design. The pictures are big, the watches are shiny, the text is thin sans serifs. The prices are…outlandish to say the least. But the content is very product-centric with the visuals providing the lifestyle messaging. For inspiration, I went straight to the masters of upscale retail: Rolex. Noting that we didn’t have and were unlikely to be able to produce video content for the top of the front page, I opted for scenic mountain pictures to set the mood and placed large cutouts of two of the top-selling watches in the right-hand featured space. Combined with a tastefully tracked-out sans serif font, I was able to create the ambiance that Rolex achieved with a yachting theme, but with mountaineering visuals instead. Would you bring your Heritor on a climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro? No, of course not. But would you really bring your Rolex out on the water? I sure hope you wouldn’t!
This website was designed on a twelve-column grid and the front end was developed with a heavily-modified version of Bootstrap 4. It took me a week to make the mockups, another few days for approval, and 2-3 weeks to code the front end. From there, it went into the queue and was later paired with a Laravel back-end, using NetSuite for the inventory. It is mobile-friendly and works on all screen sizes.
The interesting market space occupied by Heritor and Resultco was a challenge, but I also think it was also liberating in a sense. Really all I had to do was make a site that was better than the original, and I feel that I knocked this one out of the park in that respect. I also had the opportunity to dive back in to front end development and check out Bootstrap 4. The flex box utility was helpful for floating layouts and it one of my favorite features now. The audience, Resultco’s distribution partners and sales clients, really enjoyed the redesign, and the sales team gave it glowing reviews on the enhanced usability and the fact that they were actually proud to show off their site to potential clients. And that’s what I think it most important here: you need to be happy with your website when you share it. You can get away with a sub-par website, but you do better when you’re excited to show it off. When you’re excited about your product and marketing, your customers pick up on it, and there’s very few emotions more powerful in marketing than honest excitement.