Hatch Mansfield, a UK specialist in premium wine, appointed Headscape to help design and build a new website to reflect its growing portfolio of independent family owned wine producers.
The company has grown from representing three brands when it was first established 25 years ago to 17 internationally acclaimed wineries, including Champagne Taittinger, Louis Jadot, Errazuriz and Villa Maria.
The brief was to provide comprehensive, relevant brand information in an easy to navigate format for its audience of trade customers, journalists, suppliers, internal team, and consumers that may be searching on the individual brands.
The Headscape team worked hard to understand the complexities of our business and translated this is into an easy to navigate website. At the outset they clearly laid out the process to take us from start to finish.
One of the most useful and rewarding steps was the brainstorming workshop that we undertook at the beginning with key stakeholders. This was invaluable and fun, establishing the way forward for the structural and visual design.
The team have always been helpful and tried to find a solution to each problem that arose on the way, explaining it in everyday language.
The final website certainly delivers on the brief and we have had excellent feedback from our internal teams, customers and suppliers.
The team continues to help us on an ongoing basis as our own business expands and we have to find solutions to new brands that join our portfolio ‘breaking the mould’. Our joint forward thinking has helped us manage new challenges beyond the launch of the site .
Rachel Hollinrake, Marketing Services & Trade Events Manager, Hatch Mansfield
A unique challenge
One of the main project challenges was to ensure the new site could accommodate the unique style of each of the brands whilst still making them feel part of a cohesive Hatch Mansfield whole. A standardised layout for brand landing pages which could be customised with individual brand colours, logos and images achieved this. Colours are carried through to underlying content rich pages, whilst the layout allows consistent navigation to these across all brands.
Finding wines
Our greatest UX challenge involved ensuring users could easily find product details filtering by multiple criteria – region, producer, grape and more. Each brand had a different hierarchy and structure which added layers of complexity when trying to find a cohesive way to present across the Hatch Mansfield umbrella brand. Wine data is managed and stored in an internal product management system. We needed to work with the system’s developer to integrate and synchronise with the new website.
We devised in-depth error checking logs which allowed us to troubleshoot the process and identify discrepancies in the data formatting so they could be corrected. The backend implementation also allows for a fully scalable solution as Hatch Mansfield continues to grow as a business.
Ongoing management
Frontend development embraced WordPress’ Block editor to allow Hatch Mansfield editors to continue to tell their story in a content rich way.
