Crest Leather

A much-needed refresh

Since 1996, Crest Leather has crafted some of the world’s most innovative leather for the upholstery, hospitality, interior and product design industries – combining centuries-old Italian craftsmanship practices with pioneering technology and style.

Crest Leather’s social media platforms had been left redundant for over a year, and the website was in need of a complete overhaul, from both a design and user journey perspective. Tann Westlake’s brief was to increase users and sales by development a new website, managing Crest Leather’s social media and creating content for both. 

Analysing the current position

The team started by carefully reviewing and auditing the Crest Leather website and social platforms to understand the audience, highlight areas for improvement, and to outline objectives for the team to work towards over the coming months. It was clear from the audit, that the user journey needed to be redefined, and both the website and social media platforms needed consistency in terms of the branding and tone of voice. In order to achieve this, the team would need to start with a clean slate, and build both the website and social media platforms from the ground up, with no reliance on any of the previous website or social media content.

Social optimisation

The digital marketing team started with by redesigning the social media platforms, whilst the development team began the process of scoping the website. In order to work towards the objective of increasing the size of the social media audience, and the engagement, the team created a backlog of social media content which would be utilised across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn over the months to come.

In addition to focussing on the key social media platforms, the team also remove any unnecessary accounts or profiles, particularly those which were both inactive or irrelevant to the target audience. Collaborating with the creative team, the digital marketing team built a six-month plan, perfecting the tone of voice and developing a new visual style.

Once the plan was approved by Crest Leather, the team began to publish across each of the social media platforms, engaging with potential customers and responding to comments and messages.

Website design and development

Working closely with the Crest Leather team on the ever-important website UI and UX, the team focussed on understanding the needs of Crest Leather, its values and expectations from the website, and its role in the wider business strategy.

Utilising decades of combined experience, in addition to extensive research, the team was able to design the structure of the website, starting with wireframes, and visualise the various sections of the website, from the homepage to the ranges of leather available (including the option to purchase free samples). The pages were all designed with the intention of increasing sample orders and enquiries, to deliver potential new customers, sales enquiries and larger orders. Once the design stage had been completed, the site was developed on a staging server before being published to the live site.

A 400% increase in accounts

Following the website development, and the launch of the social media campaign, the website accumulated 258 orders in the first two months, and the social platforms acquired a huge increase in followers of 122.7%. 

In addition, the Crest Leather team confirmed it had noted the set up of new accounts being set up within their system had increased by 400%. The following statistics are just a selection of those that highlight the success of both the new website, social media campaign, and more recently a Google Ads campaign targeted geographically in South Africa.