The Challenge
Alex Clark Art is a North East business with global reach, selling cards and gift items throughout the world. When they first came to us they had a hugely successful business to business model, however direct to consumer business was poor with monthly sales struggling to reach anything like what we believed was their potential.
The initial challenge was significant: facilitate over 2,500 SKUs, combine an established trade business with a consumer-facing e-commerce site, and make it all simple to manage. And as the business grew, so did their needs - requiring us to build increasingly sophisticated solutions to support their direct to consumer business expansion.
Our Approach
We've taken a true partnership approach with the team at Alex Clark Art, working with them over multiple years to develop their digital infrastructure as their business has evolved. Rather than forcing them into off-the-shelf solutions that would become expensive and cumbersome as they scaled, we've built bespoke systems tailored precisely to their needs.
This meant starting with a solid foundation - a dual-purpose e-commerce platform serving both retail and trade customers - then continuously developing it to add the functionality they needed as they grew.
The Solution
Over the course of our partnership, we've delivered:
Bespoke E-commerce Platform
A fully custom-built system managing 2,500+ products across both retail and trade channels. The platform includes complex offer and discount systems, a friend referral scheme, and sophisticated inventory management - all built from the ground up to work exactly how their business needs it to for both trade and retail customers.
Custom Email Marketing System
As their customer database grew into six figures, third-party email services like Mailchimp were becoming prohibitively expensive, and crucially as they were paying per recipient, this led to an illogical desire to reduce the mailing lists - when in reality, the entire strategy should've been focused on building them!
We built them a complete in-house email direct marketing system integrated directly with their website's CMS. This allows them to create and send campaigns to their entire mailing list quickly and cost-effectively at a fixed cost per month regardless of the number of recipients.
Ongoing Development Partnership
Rather than treating each requirement as a separate project, we work with Alex Clark Art as an ongoing technical partner. When they need new functionality, we build it into their existing platform, ensuring everything works together seamlessly. We work with them to review and suggest updates and potential avenues for growth as we feel appropriate.
The Results
The website has transformed from a basic contact point to a central business asset driving both trade and retail sales globally. The bespoke email system alone saves them significant monthly costs while giving them complete control over their customer communications.
Most importantly, they have a platform that grows with them - adding new functionality as they need it without the constraints or costs of third-party solutions. A real case of business synergy which has proved its approach by the development of the direct to retail market into a significant part of the overall business.
Services Provided
- Bespoke e-commerce development (retail & trade)
- Custom CMS development
- Email marketing platform development
- Complex discount and offer systems
- Friend referral scheme
- Ongoing technical partnership
Hats off to John and his team, based in beautiful Rothbury, who created for us a first class website after a number of costly projects with other companies fell short of the mark.
Also, they don’t charge ongoing, mandatory maintenance fees so that, together with their reliability and style and human beings in their office who speak to you at the end of the phone when any problems are encountered, makes them a pleasure to work with.
Erik Nielsen. Alex Clark Art
