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Innovative UI and UX design bolster brand loyalty and drive D2C growth for Breville
The small kitchen appliance market has long been dominated by behemoths like Whirlpool, Electrolux, and Newell Brands that make everything from blenders to microwaves. In this competitive market, Breville, the 90-year Australian brand best known for its widely lauded home espresso machines, has made a global name for itself by combining thoughtful design with exceptional innovation to empower people to do things more easily and impressively than they thought possible in their own kitchens.
Breville has had long and successful partnerships with third-party retailers like Williams Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, and Bloomingdale’s, and the company wanted to enhance its D2C channel to better reflect its premium brand positioning while improving its customers’ culinary journeys by reimagining its ecommerce experiences. Breville first enlisted Astound as a visual and user experience (UX) design partner to develop and design a holistic ecommerce coffee solution in 2020. That initial project spawned a two-year collaboration in which we worked closely with Breville on its UX and user interface (UI) evolution across multiple brands and sites.
Breville approached Astound with a unique problem: although Breville espresso machines are thoughtfully designed to be easy to use, exploding global demand for specialty coffee and glowing press for the company’s innovative home range meant that many customers had never actually made an espresso before purchasing a Breville machine. The company needed to find a way to set these new at-home baristas up for success by ensuring they had the information, tools, and freshly roasted beans to craft a delicious cup of coffee the very first time they operated their new purchase.
At the same time, Breville’s flagship website needed to better capture the brand’s essence as an innovative producer of intuitively designed kitchen appliances: the homepage needed to tell a more unified, inspirational story while guiding users through their purchase experience.
From Day One, we adopted a highly collaborative approach, working seamlessly with Breville’s in-house teams. After an extensive content audit, we hosted co-creation workshops on topics ranging from customer research and profiling to user journey mapping and intricate interface experience sketching. Together, we came up with a comprehensive ecommerce “Coffee Bundle Solution,” reinventing the machine-purchasing process as a holistic package that guides users to their perfect espresso, offers specialty coffee bean subscriptions from 50 of the best coffee roasters across the country, and includes premium instructional content.
We then applied this in-depth knowledge of Breville, its products, and its customers to help elevate the company’s digital experiences across multiple brands by designing award-winning new websites, optimizing promotions and capabilities, and streamlining product launch pages.
We redesigned Breville’s flagship website, building a new homepage, product detail pages (PDPs), and navigation structure to create a cohesive brand story and a best-in-class user journey. The new site showcases Breville as a leading expert in high-quality kitchen appliances and offers a sophisticated look and feel to match the brand’s innovative machines and design heritage. The main site navigation was reimagined to guide users at every stage of their shopping journey: Shop, for people already interested in a specific product; Discover, for those who need guidance to find the right machine; Inspiration, a new hub we created for educational content, for browsers seeking culinary tutorials and how-tos that might connect them with a product; and Support, for existing customers seeking customer service. We also personalized the homepage for logged-in users so that it surfaces the details of registered machines and pairs them with relevant content.
To create a consistent aesthetic and streamline the company’s marketing efforts, we helped Breville unify campaign and product launch pages across the new site. We began by auditing 10 existing Breville microsites to ensure that our design would meet varied needs for landing pages ranging from a single product like the Smart Oven Pizzaiolo to a complete line of precision brewers. We then created a single, scalable template complete with an entire library of reusable mix-and-match components and layouts that the Breville marketing team could use for all future campaigns and product launches. The Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro became the first product launched with the new template, and we went on to convert every previous product page into the new format to create a coherent feel throughout the site. After our work on breville.com, we redesigned beanz.com (Breville’s specialty coffee bean subscription platform) and chefsteps.com (Breville’s premium kitchen content channel).
In summer 2022, while the redesign of beanz.com was still in process, Breville decided it wanted to create a holiday e-gift card experience that spanned both beanz.com and breville.com. From homepage modules and checkout flow to recipient emails and landing pages, we worked to architect and design a beautiful, frictionless customer journey that would unite delighted recipients with delicious cups of coffee. Despite the complexity of navigating both old and new versions of beanz.com, we delivered our designs in just six weeks, which gave the Breville internal development team enough time to build and launch the e-gift card experience for the 2022 holiday season.
“What an amazing collaboration. Astound worked seamlessly with our internal design team and consistently delivered innovative solutions to complex problems. We got so much farther, faster than we could have possibly without them—from helping re-envision our shopping proposition to capturing Breville’s unique brand experience to creating a best-in-class UI/UX for our ecommerce flagship. We’ve seen both online sales and conversion increase, and won a handful of design awards, which is wonderful validation of the work we’ve done together.”
—Andrew Sirotnik, Chief Solutions Officer, Breville
Over the past two years, we’ve collaborated closely with Breville on various UI and UX design projects that help build brand loyalty and drive D2C growth. Highlights include:
