Saying “I Do” to Digital

High-end jewelers have traditionally lagged behind other retailers in embracing ecommerce, fearing customers wouldn’t commit to major emotional and financial decisions like choosing engagement rings online. However, global COVID-19 disruptions accelerated the industry’s digital transformation, and online sales are now slated to comprise roughly 20 percent of the fine jewelry market by 2025, according to McKinsey & Company.

An early adopter of ecommerce with an established digital presence, Philadelphia-based Steven Singer Jewelers was perfectly poised to support the surge in online business at the start of the pandemic and enjoyed strong sales through its Salesforce Commerce Cloud site. However, by 2022, the brand wanted to improve the web performance of its storefront and decided to transition to Shopify Plus for a simpler, more agile platform that better fits its B2C needs.

Impressed with the work Astound had done on the brand’s Commerce Cloud storefront, Steven Singer Jewelers asked us to pitch for this project and selected us as the right partner to implement its replatform and redesign on Shopify Plus.

To achieve its goal of becoming a US$100 million business, Steven Singer Jewelers was deeply invested in digital growth and committed to recreating the intimate experience of shopping for jewelry at its brick-and-mortar store online. Although the brand recognized that Shopify Plus, with its flexible, easy-to-use retail storefronts, was the ideal platform to realize its ambitions, the jeweler also wanted to preserve the highly customized features and functionality it had developed for its Commerce Cloud site.

In addition, with data spread across multiple systems, Steven Singer Jewelers was struggling to create a single source of truth for each customer, a process that still required significant manual effort from the brand’s lean but multitalented ecommerce team. To reach its revenue goals, the jeweler, locally famous for its cheeky “I hate Steven Singer” billboards and radio spots, also wanted to grow brand awareness beyond the Philadelphia region.

Beginning with the presale process, we worked to ensure feature parity between Commerce Cloud and Shopify Plus, seeking out the optimal third-party integrations to enable key functionalities on Steven Singer Jewelers’ new storefront. Given the brand’s lofty ambitions for the replatform, we also conducted a Business Vision & Proposition Workshop to identify critical business goals, determine key KPIs to measure success, and define a business roadmap by highlighting critical web features that would drive revenue.

To ease pressure on internal teams, we focused on optimizing data migration to the new platform by pinpointing what data needed to be preserved, identifying how to improve business flow, and creating a future-state systems architecture diagram. From competitor analysis and brand immersion to front-end definition and personalization opportunities, our in-depth discovery process was designed to establish the new storefront as the foundation for Steven Singer Jewelers’ current and future needs.

From an SEO standpoint, we optimized the new site for visibility (via indexation, keyword, content strategies), while at the same time preserving the organic search equity that Steven Singer had built up overtime.

Leveraging our comprehensive Shopify Plus expertise, we built a highly customized front end with numerous third-party integrations to support key brand features, including ReCharge Payments to support Steven Singer Jeweler’s unique 24K Roses subscription service, Klevu to power predictive search, and Klaviyo to optimize marketing emails.

To reproduce Steven Singer Jewelers’ unique in-store experience as closely as possible online, we designed a clean, clutter-free mobile-first storefront that focused on connecting customers with staff members and eliminating any impediments to purchase. Throughout the redesign process, we collaborated closely with internal teams to bring the brand’s unique visual style and aesthetic to life online while incorporating the modern ecommerce look and feel that today’s discerning shoppers expect.

We successfully replatformed Steven Singer Jewelers to Shopify Plus in June 2023. Highlights include:

• The project was completed in less than six months from discovery to launch
• Lighthouse performance scores improved by five points over its previous storefront, with marked improvement in accessibility, SEO, and best practice
• A future-proof storefront that will help Steven Singers Jewelers achieve its ambitious revenue goals