One of our regular clients came back to us with a new challenge – they wanted to rebrand and relaunch their Shopify store with a fresh name and logo. We went beyond that though, introducing bespoke app functionality and some killer new features for their loyal customers.
IVC Evidensia operates hundreds of vet clinics across the UK, caring for 1.5 million animals.
We have been doing work with Pet Health Club – formerly My Family Vets – for years now. First, we migrated their original ecommerce store from Kentico across to Shopify Plus. Another time, we helped launch their product subscription service, by integrating Recharge functionality into that store.
My Family Vets is a sub-brand of IVC Evidensia, who work with hundreds of veterinary clinics across the UK and abroad. However, the consumer is likely unfamiliar with the IVC Evidensia name – as these clinics are operated on a white label basis, each outlet adding their own name and branding.
My Family Vets was the consumer-facing e-commerce brand for their Shopify store, serving hundreds of thousands of Pet Health Club members across the UK.
Throughout these clinics, customers are invited to sign up for membership in the Pet Health Club: granting them discounts on veterinary treatments, as well as significant savings in the My Family Vets store on Shopify.
However, this created something of a branding disconnect – the customer would walk into an independently-branded local vets’ clinic, operated by IVC Evidensia, where they signed up for Pet Health Club membership, and were able to access discounts at My Family Vets. That’s a lot of different names!
So the client came back to Inspira Digital, and asked if we could help them to streamline things a bit.
The rebrand to Pet Health Club was aimed at improving brand awareness and recognition across their many clinics.
My Family Vets decided that the most logical solution was to rebrand – changing the name of their online store to the Pet Health Club, the same as their membership programme – to give the consumer one fewer name to remember.
This move would promote better brand awareness and recognition, but it would take more than just a new logo. As far as the consumer was concerned, the My Family Vets online store would cease to exist – to be replaced instead with the Pet Health Club store.
This new store would need to maintain the same structure and functionality of the previous one. Specifically, customer data such as subscription details or membership perks would have to be perfectly preserved – for the client’s extensive customer base numbering into the hundreds of thousands! So we didn’t really have room for error on this one.
This project was more than just a rebrand; it was also about rewarding loyal Pet Health Club members with exclusive features and discounts.
After discussing ideas with the client, we agreed that the new store should come with rewards for Pet Health Club’s loyal customers – so that the rebrand incentivised customers to fully embrace the new model.
The Pet Health Club store would still be open to all. However, we would create a new system that granted even greater subscription discounts to club members. They would also get exclusive access to a ‘subscription price match promise,’ to reward and strengthen loyalty.
To make this work, we would need to implement a system that granted different ‘subscribe and save’ discounts according to the customer’s status. Fortunately, we had already built the foundations for this, on a previous project (which had involved creating a bespoke Recharge integration for the client).
Another new feature the client wanted was to be able to control the discount amount in relation to the size of the order. So for example, if a client purchased a larger bag of pet food, their discount might hit a higher percentage.
Shopify Plus can tackle such channels using some clever native functionality… though in this case, the solution required a little extra thinking, as it would need to work alongside the existing model for product subscriptions plus a rather complex membership discount system.
So – our approach was to add a new piece of bespoke functionality around ‘product siblings.’ Each bag size would technically be set up as a separate product, but then be linked together via metafields to display on the store as if they were variants of the same product.
With all these added improvements in discussion, what started off as a rebrand job was starting to look like quite a major project now!
So how did we tackle the Pet Health Club rebrand and relaunch? Well, as always, we workshopped the project extensively with the client first – brainstorming all kinds of potential approaches and solutions.
Here’s how our process looked, once we agreed a plan and got to work:
Remember how the client needed to offer different discounts, on different order sizes? The solution we came up with was to set these different sizes up as different products in the system – but have them appear as variants of a single product to the site user.
However, in practice we found that this created an admin problem. Because to ensure a smooth relaunch, we needed to migrate all active subscriptions from the old version of the product, across to the new one.
Our team came up with a great solution for this though:
We updated our bespoke Recharge integration, to automatically migrate all relevant customers from legacy products to the new version of the product… and to update the subscription price, making sure that loyal customers automatically got the better deal!
All the client had to do was add the correct tag to the product – and our app did the rest, potentially saving hundreds of man-hours in the process.
When it came to going live with the new store, Shopify’s fantastic infrastructure made things far simpler than it might have been on another platform.
When it came to going live with the new store, Shopify’s fantastic infrastructure made things far simpler than it might have been on another platform.
"The launch was a great success… Thanks to the Inspira Digital team who have been super helpful with getting the project over the line."
So how did it all turn out?
Robert Horne at the Pet Health Club reported that the new store launch had been “a great success… Thanks to the Inspira Digital team who have been super helpful with getting the project over the line.”
The new store looked fantastic, with bespoke functionality that allowed the Pet Health Club to engage and reward its customers in new and effective ways.
The ‘subscription price match promise’ was a particularly compelling addition, and would really incentivise customers to become Pet Health Club members. And by streamlining the brand names, the client would now enjoy greater brand recognition across the online store and associated pet shops.
We were delighted with the outcome of this project, and thrilled that the clients were so pleased with it too.
So if you’re considering a rebrand, why not see what we can do for you? Inspira Digital has 15+ years of experience delivering bespoke solutions for Shopify and Shopify Plus.
We would love to hear about your project – so drop us a line, and let’s chat!
