Mick’s House of Fleetwood is an exciting new lifestyle brand created by Grammy Award winning rock and roll icon, Mick Fleetwood. I am leading the redesign of the website, managing a complete rebuild, and contributing to art direction and brand strategy.
Mick’s House of Fleetwood opened its first location in Pā’ia, Maui in 2022. The opening was highly anticipated, and the brick-and-mortar store has seen great commercial success. However, their online store has seen only modest sales and has poor conversion rates.
I was approached about a redesign with the goals of:
In order to determine the best way to help Mick and his team achieve their goals, I began researching.
I performed a competitive analysis of high-end aspirational lifestyle brands with dedicated customers like Tommy Bahama, Lululemon, and Louis Vuitton. During my analysis, I paid special attention to art, copy, layout, and menus.
After my competitive analysis, I performed a heuristic evaluation on the Mick’s House of Fleetwood website. I wanted to see how the site flowed, how easy it was to find items to purchase, and determine issues that contributed to (or caused) poor conversion rates.
Finally, I spoke with customers and store staff. I asked the customers to perform specific tasks on the website and gathered feedback. I asked the staff to discuss their interactions with the site.
Key findings & areas for improvement
I learned a lot from my research and subsequent analysis.
Before we started the visual design, we needed to determine the best framework for the site. After discussing the pros and cons of commercially available frameworks, the team decided to move forward with the Shopify platform.
Based on the research analysis, I wanted to explore designs that made it easy to find all of the cool products Mick’s House of Fleetwood had to offer. Visually, I was inspired by Lululemon’s layout – where it was easy to find products by style, activity, or gender. Menu-wise, I was inspired by REI – where users can find the same products in a multitude of ways (by sport, gender, product type, etc).
After exploring different layouts and agreeing on a path forward, I provided art direction and oversaw the creation of high fidelity prototypes that were handed off to a development team to code.
It takes more than just a gorgeous, mobile first website to drive sales and engagement. Products need to be easy to find and hard to resist. Research has shown that it’s much easier to abandon items in an online store than the physical one – so I concentrated on making the products come to life on the page by concentrating on professional lifestyle photos and authentic copy that matched with brand voice.
Making products discoverable
While the team was developing the high-fidelity designs, I got to work with Mick’s team on a strategy to make all of his cool products discoverable. One of the issues with his old website was that due to a lack of taxonomy and categorization, it was nearly impossible to find products to purchase. For example, searches for ‘t-shirt’, ‘t shirt’, ‘tee’, and ‘t’ all returned different (and not overlapping) results.
To fix this, I looked to REI for inspiration. I created a taxonomy and category system that will allow users to find products in a myriad of ways. In the future, customers will be able to shop by gender, product type, and event. I’ve made it easy for someone to find the perfect gift for any Fleetwood Mac fan.
SEO
Another difficulty that Mick’s House of Fleetwood had is that it was hard to find online. It was difficult to find unless you searched for “Mick’s House of Fleetwood” specifically. A large part of that was due to very few references to Mick Fleetwood, Fleetwood Mac, or Fleetwood Mac band members. For example, a hand-made Stevie Nicks concert tee reprint that was exclusive to Mick’s House of Fleetwood had a title and description of ‘Vintage Concert Tee’.
By standardizing the product titles and descriptions, making them more playful to reflect Mick’s personality, and adding references to Mick, Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac band members, and their most famous hits, I am hoping to improve SEO.
Below is a sample of a product description for a Limited Edition Mick’s House of Fleetwood ringer tee.
Limited Edition Mick’s House of Fleetwood ringer tee – A Mick’s House of Fleetwood Exclusive
You can go your own way with your brand new Mick’s House of Fleetwood ringer tee… The shirt feels soft and has a classic vintage look. It’s the perfect shirt to wear around town or to the beach. Pick yours up today and rock out (or in)… it’s up to you.
The limited edition Mick’s House of Fleetwood ringer tee is:
Recommended song pairing: “Go Your Own Way”, from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, 1977
