R/GA London Partners with Le Creuset to Transform its EMEA D2C Offering
R/GA London announces that it has partnered with the iconic premium cookware company, Le Creuset, to transform the brand’s direct to consumer offering, across its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, including the launch of a new e-commerce platform.
With the importance of Le Creuset’s D2C journey more significant than ever due to the changing market conditions, R/GA London helped pivot this legacy brand and create a next generation e-commerce platform that weaves content and commerce together to create an experience that better reflects the way people perceive the brand offline and expect to it to behave online. The new e-commerce platform will have a staggered launch across the region’s 19 markets starting in June 2020 – with the UK site going fully live today.
"As consumers and particularly retail consumers place even greater importance on their digital experience with brands, it is critical we continue to lead in our sector and listen to their changing needs. So this is just as much a business transformation journey as it is a new e-commerce platform story for us." said Michael Scheepers, CEO for Le Creuset EMEA. "This evolution of our D2C offering is a big step to ensuring our much loved iconic products end up in even more kitchens, while underlining our lifestyle brand credentials. By having a stronger consumer experience, we will also continue to look after our valuable wholesale partners – driving demand of our products with their customers and ensuring our business remains strong and future-proofed right the way across our EMEA region."
"Our research uncovered the insight that there is a true emotional bond with the product and brand. We set about creating an experience that captured the unique DNA of Le Creuset and could scale to every touchpoint." said Rebecca Bezzina, SVP managing director R/GA London. "We created a new tone of voice alongside a visual and experience language, helping Le Creuset EMEA expand and elevate its brand storytelling across its entire connected customer journey."
R/GA London collaborated with Le Creuset on the strategy and design of its new e-commerce platform, designing a language that unified, simplified and refined how the brand showcases its products, celebrates its heritage and strengthens its stake in food culture. At the core of this was creating a vision and strategy that would be delivered through a modular and scalable system, that moved beyond a transactional experience to create services that build long lasting and meaningful relationships, shifting utilities to destinations. This new modular system also gives each local market control of how to update and localise content according to their needs.
"Re-imagining our digital ecosystem in response to the disruption facing the retail sector has been an ongoing priority for our business long before the global crisis we’re now facing came along. However, it goes without saying that Covid-19 has accelerated the importance of having a market leading D2C offering and e-commerce platform." said Christopher Koller, consumer and digital experience director at Le Creuset EMEA. "We challenged R/GA to expand the magic of Le Creuset across our entire experience and create relationships that last as long our cookware, which is why we’re delighted to be able to showcase this best-in-class new digital platform."
Combining content and commerce, R/GA also designed a new tone of voice and experience language that streamlines merchandising and publishing workflows, for faster, meaningful growth. The new site also takes an editorial approach to tell product stories and ultimately show who Le Creuset is: its heritage, its brand ethos, its people, its innovation. By changing the customer conversation from price to value, the platform has been designed not just to help people buy products, but also use and adapt to their ever-changing lives, with everything from recipes and events to services and lifestyle partnerships.
