Hello friends,
Before I officially came to be on the GGMS team, I looked at the website and it looked really boring. I always thought the branding could be stronger and could yell out to the world that "WE SELL TOYS!"
I was told by the person who was managing the store at the time that we couldn't actually change anything: the theme dictated what we could and could not do. I had dabbled with websites before and I just found that hard to believe, but it wasn't my place at the time to say anything more. I was instead tasked with creating buttons to help with site navigation. I was not given any brand parameters except a specific font, so I tried my best. I taught myself how to use Photoshop and used the colours found in the GGMS logo.
They turned out alright, and they were our navigation buttons for three years, but our brand has evolved a lot since then. After I officially took over I found that we could do many things to create a visual brand for ourselves. I tried many themes until I found one that I felt really captured what we are as a brand: we are fun, innovative, and audacious. Enter our newest theme.
Last week we implemented my plan to ease customer navigation of the catalogue. The old buttons were also very large and required a lot of scrolling to see all of the options available. My new button redesign tightened up the navigation by making all the options visible on the page.
We have over 1000 individual designs, and the old navigation just wasn't scaling up with us. I really wanted to give customers another option to browse the catalogue by their favourite tribe (ex. Speed Broozers, Lucky Broozers, Prime Broozers, etc.) so we added that functionality.
Another unwieldy part of the website was our extensive conversion bits catalogue. It was just impossible to quickly find anything. So I added more navigation to help the customer filter through in order to see only the types of bits they want.
And we didn't just improve functionality of the Broozer and Wrecker collections. We went through all of our licensed product lines and made them easier to shop as well. Some of these collections are not populated yet and that is because we are future proofing! We have many more designs coming to us very soon from the licensers!
I am so proud of how far we have come as a business in three years. I have had to learn everything on the job and to be honest, I really wasn't sure I could do it when I agreed to join the team. Da Boss had all the faith in me that I could do it well, even when I had no faith in myself. I am so grateful to him for this opportunity to have a job that I love, and to have the opportunity to challenge myself and learn new things every day.
Please have a look around the site and let me know what you think! How did I do? Are there any things we could add to the next site update (which is probably happening soon, as we prepare many exciting things behind the scenes).
Until next time, be nice and roll dice!
Tanya