Working with a well-established and award-winning client – Symprove – our task was to develop an entirely new website offering without causing any disruption to ongoing business. What began as a design job would instead prove the greatest test to our project management skills – as we liaised with various departments providing daily (and sometimes even minute-by-minute) updates. The outcome was a huge success though, with a seamless launch of the new site, and an immediate 40% boost to performance.
Symprove is the producer of an award-winning gut supplement, loved by its users, and highly recommended by scientists and experts. Since 2002, they have helped over 100,000 people to live life to the full – by providing a groundbreaking natural gut health product that has incredible customer benefits. Sold both as one-off packs and on recurring subscriptions, Symprove is a fast-moving and agile business, which is constantly improving its popular customer proposition.
Symprove is a busy brand with a lot of moving parts. Behind the scenes though, when they came to us, they were undergoing a process of massive change and evolution. Internally, they had an entirely new team driving the digital optimisation of their Shopify store. Simultaneously, Symprove was in the process of a complete product rebrand.
Our task was to upgrade the current website to a 2.0 theme, initially using the available theme settings and minimal UX customisation… though it soon became clear that the subscription purchase journey, in particular, would require some highly-customised UX solutions.
All the while, we would be working with an active, dynamic brand – liaising with their different departments – and ensuring no disruption would be caused to their ongoing business as we evolved their online presence.
This presented a number of project challenges from the outset, and it required a very agile approach from the Inspira team. Essentially we would act as the anchor for project management, working closely with their branding team, UX designer, product manager and development team, as well as balancing the needs of stakeholders. It was vital that we provided clear guidance, and timelines for delivery – via daily development standups, and weekly planning sessions which we executed in sprints of two-week efforts.
This allowed us to be responsive in handling important deadlines, planning and executing in parallel… while providing the Symprove product team with the clarity they needed to manage senior stakeholders through a very important transition in the business.
During the tightest timelines, and critical launches, communications compressed down to by-the-minute updates, to keep everyone aligned.
Now in our fifteenth year of delivering large Shopify projects, we have evolved a solid project process. Nevertheless, we are still constantly learning and developing, through our work with clients – and the Symprove job was a challenge. It demanded unique and responsive approaches, as we guided them through the pressures of the rebrand.
To this end we adopted a lean approach to planning, with fast project iteration and early client feedback. Though we wouldn’t necessarily always work this way, we estimate that in this case the lean approach reduced the friction usually associated with planning by perhaps 40%. With such a busy brand, it was necessary to work this way – and we achieved it by fostering a fluid and highly-integrated working relationship with Symprove. Through regular communication with multiple departments, we were able to match our output to their ambitious daily and weekly goals.
Since then however, the Symprove team has been able to grow together and solidify its working practices, in line with its longer-term planning horizons. We were able to aid them in building a strong and results-driven schedule, which is now making fantastic weekly progress through Symprove's strategic goals.
We are happy to report that the Symprove project was a complete success. The new website theme was deployed with next-to-zero business disruption, while the mobile version in particular – a major business avenue for Symprove – saw a 40% performance improvement. We accredit this to a combination of the new theme 2.0 structure, in parallel to our optimisation of the store’s codebase, load order and dependencies.
“Since launch, we've got a reduced bounce rate, more time on site, more page depth… at a high level conversion is up. We’ve also seen improvements in subscription-first goals, effectively doubling the likelihood of customers staying with us on a long-term subscription.”
Take it from the team themselves:
Max Kinden, Symprove Product Manager
We faced some early challenges with this project, and it was a real test of our flexibility – coordinating across a new team and the many moving parts of the Symprove brand. Ultimately however, this project would prove to be a massive success. The Symprove site launch was seamless, organised, and it was very well received by Symprove’s stakeholders: an example of true across-the-board professional collaboration.
