Client
Established in early 80s, Holten group of companies consist of several mid-to-high-end distribution businesses, transportation company, a retail chain, and several product brands.
First impression
The first thing people see, whether on desktop or mobile, forms the very first impression of your business. It sets the tone for the rest of the website and is the ideal place to show that you and your products or services are unique and wow your visitors. Let’s see how Holten’s competitors are trying to wow their customers.
Competition
These are all the same. None of them is unique in any way. Remove their logos and you won’t tell them apart. They all have a room scene with some text on a white canvas. Complex backgrounds makes it hard to read on some websites. Overlays distort the product colours or texture on another. And large body copy won’t wow anyone.
Pro & high end
Let’s look at some of the best websites that sell high-end specialty products:
What makes the above examples different is that they all show their products, not room scenes, on a black canvas, and with as little text as possible. People believe that their product is different because their presentation is different. But how do you turn what competitors position as commodity into a premium, sought-after, specialty product?
Product presentation trends
The following images showcase a wide variety of products and services ranging from sunglasses, jewellery, handbags, food and beverage, and personal care products, to design services, and portfolios but they all have one thing in common; hands.
Hands are very expressive. We use gestures in our visual communications and body language on regular basis: e.g. delivering something on a silver platter, praising and elevating someone, or rejecting something undesirable and unwanted.
Solution
The following hero image features the product that is praised and elevated. The abstract shape it is flying through is based on the company’s logo in the top left corner. The off-black background also displays the product.
The pillars of branding a website, or anything else, are four:
- Appropriate to the brand as it features their best-selling product that is elevated and praised, along with branded shapes (triangle) and colours (black)
- Bold – revamping a basic site of a 40 year-old conservative brick-and-mortar business into an iconic, album-cover-like hero with black mannequin hands is game changing
- Consistent throughout the website, including black and white team portraits and latest news posters, footers, and other sections as well as with the brand in general
- Different from competition, showing that Holten is a unique business with unique, premium, specialty products
Shop page
A lot of thought went into shop and product page, filtering, and product presentation. Each colour has its own name, hex code, and slug but they can also be grouped in colour groups for the filtering purposes:
Product page
Product page gallery features large images that show all product details. Product attributes such as colours, formats are available in the sidebar. Descriptions, technical info and downloadable files can be found in accordions with a branded triangle icons, custom iconography, branded throbber, and other:
Blog and events pages
Architectural, distribution, and retail companies host a lot of virtual or in-person events that require individual pages with information and registration forms. Both the blog and the events pages utilise on-brand black and white design:
