Victoria + Albert Baths

Part of Fortune Brands, Victoria + Albert Baths (V+A) is a British brand selling striking luxury freestanding baths.

Catering to property developers, architects, interior designers and homeowners worldwide, V+A is renowned for its craftsmanship.

The challenge

Growth was at the forefront of V+A’s business activity. To achieve these goals, it had three objectives:

• Reinforce its position as a leader in luxury
• Increase brand awareness
• Support sales and drive B2B leads

Most of its sales are through showroom partners around the country, with its flagship showroom based in Chelsea. To reach its objectives, V+A wanted a new global ecommerce website.

The website needed to cater to V+A’s five core regions in six different languages. Crucially, the content had to be easy to manage and flexible. All carried out through one central content management system.

The website also needed to support V+A’s relationship with its B2B audience. There still needed to be a clear conversion path to showrooms so that the sales team could build on relationships.

To support the brand, the website needed to embody the luxury and excellence of its baths. This meant decluttering the website’s product catalogue only to display the finest range.

The site structure also needed to be flexible enough to roll out to V+A’s sister brand websites.

Our approach

Because V+A catered to two clear audiences, and as this was its first foray into ecommerce, we started with an in-depth discovery.

We set out to better understand V+A’s audience, the organic search landscape and how users navigated its website and CMS.

Through depth interviews with customers, persona development, customer journey mapping and detailed data reviews, we built a picture of who uses the website, how they use it and what was expected from the new site.

These findings fed into the build and content of the new site and V+A’s marketing activity.

The solution

V+A wanted a CMS that was easy to use. But because the website was multi-lingual, catering to audiences with different needs and priorities, it could quickly become bloated and unmanageable.

We treated each regional variation as its own website to ensure it was streamlined but still capable of growth. This involved creating containers for each continent and including language variants within that. This way, it’s easy to control content in the CMS and provides the foundation and structure for future growth. For website users, it’s easy to navigate to the relevant region in their native language.

For content in different languages, we used 1-to-1 translations. Content editors can create unique content across each site, which translates into the relevant languages. V+A can therefore publish content that’s most relevant for shoppers in each region, better engaging them and increasing brand awareness and conversions.

We applied the same logic to V+A’s ecommerce functionality. Each ecommerce store and stock can be tailored to each country and made hyper-relevant. Whether that’s tailoring payment methods, turning off ecommerce completely or updating terms in line with the relevant financial regulation, it can all be done in one CMS.

The results

In the six months since launch, V+A has successfully introduced another avenue for buying luxury goods. The new ecommerce website has opened up a new avenue of sales for V+A Baths, enabling it to reach its business objectives.