Urban Decay, a colour cosmetics brand with the tagline “Beauty with an Edge,” plans to launch a new content-driven website later this Autumn using the
FirstSpirit content management system. The new “UD All Access” site
will complement Urban Decay’s thriving e-commerce site based on
Demandware and give the brand’s dedicated fans a richer, more immersive
and interactive experience than what’s possible on a commerce site
alone.
“We
have the commerce side and that’s going strong. Now we’re building out
the content side and making a visually relevant, beautiful, and
interesting Urban Decay-branded portion of our site,” says John Perasco,
Assistant VP
Digital at Urban Decay. “It’s like whispering to our best beauty junkies
to come take a peek behind the curtain and come back stage with us.
People come to urbandecay.com looking for that brand voice, what we have
to say, what’s new, what’s trending. They are looking for all kinds of
content whether it’s editorial content, videos, product information or
other users’ content.”
Adding
to the challenge of managing and maintaining such a rich set of
content, Urban Decay is in the midst of a rapid global expansion and
needed a way to keep its brand presence absolutely consistent in every
country as it expands from the US to Europe, Asia and Middle East. It
also needed a way to maintain consistency across its Demandware site and
the content side. These needs first led Urban Decay to pursue a content
management system. After considering a range of options, the company’s
IT and marketing teams settled on FirstSpirit in part for its certified
Demandware integration, ease-of-use for content creators and extensive
global content management functionality.
“For
Urban Decay, managing that brand presence, that brand voice, the look
and feel, the whole customer experience is absolutely vital to us,”
Perasco explains. “Managing that from Newport Beach, the mothership if
you will, is critical. A big part of the value that FirstSpirit brings
is being able to manage across countries in a way that is flexible and
easy, but also has a good measure of control.”
The
“UD All Access” site is scheduled to go live in late October and will
be accessible as a prominent menu item on the current e-commerce site.
“The design of All Access is pretty cool. It offers a much more
immersive experience and lets people just lose track of time and explore
without feeling like they are being screamed at to buy, buy, buy,”
Perasco adds. “We have lots of vocal interaction on Instagram and
Facebook, which is great, but it’s happening off site. We’re trying to
bring some of that back to our site so we can consolidate and curate
some of the excitement.”
By
moving to a central system for managing and publishing content, Urban
Decay is in effect creating a Corporate Content Cloud for managing its
brand globally. “For popular brands with a broad following, a robust
content strategy is an extremely effective way to boost customer loyalty
and strengthen the brand further,” said Robert Bredlau, chief operating
officer for e-Spirit Inc. “However this can be a complex and
challenging task without the necessary infrastructure. By centralising
their content strategy around FirstSpirit, the Urban Decay team is well
positioned for success and we are thrilled to be partnering with them on
this undertaking.”
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