At the beginning of 2020, BRIGHT+CO was selected as the agency partner to spearhead and create both the strategy and deployment of a new responsive website for critically acclaimed Napa Valley winery, Far Niente. This was no small task as it included establishing a new family of brands’ voice and structure while combining an additional six distinct wine brands that they had acquired over time. Each brand featured a unique audience, tone, products, as well as look and feel. The goal was to create one fluid web experience that cross-promoted products and brands without compromising their individual identities. Experientially, users should know that the different wineries were connected as they navigated from brand to brand across the new multi-site layout, however still experiencing the distinctness of each wine and their nuanced approach to winemaking.
Business Challenge
Create and combine all seven brands within one website architecture with a focus on maintaining each brand’s story. Additionally, create new e-commerce flexibility and fluidity in order to increase sales and support upselling/cross-promoting products.
- How do we structure the site to have seamless navigation between brands?
- Establish an overarching tone and site navigation that supports individual brand identities
- Create solutions for storytelling to this unique and upscale audience without compromising e-commerce goals and upselling opportunities
- Setting up a customized CMS for internal site management within a single platform
Laying the Foundation
The challenge for this project was, first of all, establishing a voice and painting a clear picture that these seven brands were now all a part of the new Far Niente Family of Wineries and Vineyards. We needed to establish this foundational messaging as part of the brand which tied greatly into the website’s architecture. There needed to be continuity within the site with the layout and design so it all felt connected, an underlying thread between brands, yet it could not lose the distinction and nuance from each winery. Though they are all connected, the wineries had very unique approaches and products within this vertical.
Strategy & Execution
A new main homepage would need to be developed that featured the family of brands storyline, which would both visually and structurally showcase the connectivity between wineries. It would also boast other supporting hierarchy family pages across the site and the navigation while featuring e-commerce calls to action at every turn. Each subsidiary brand’s site would feature its own unique content, products, and pages, yet still feature and be tied into specific hierarchy “family” pages. In this way, the different sites maintained their own identity yet were clearly connected to the new family of brands. Custom e-commerce product filtering through stringent API connections was also developed so that users could shop easily by brand, varietal, region, and rating (just to name a few).
The concentrated list of needs is as follows:
- Create a fluid and clear site architecture and navigation
- Mobile friendly/responsive elegant design
- Sophisticated copywriting and brand voice
- Custom CMS platform, flexible and easy for internal team management
- Rewrite, consolidate, and restructure content across all brands
- Provide non-invasive upsell and cross-sell opportunity across brands
- Improve e-commerce shopping experience and filtering
Post Launch Results
Post Launch, we have already started to see significant improvement in site health. Comparing November of 2019 to November 2020, we were able to get the following insights into site performance and health.
- 16% decrease in bounce rate and 35% decrease in exit rate
- 10% decrease in mobile bounce rate
- 29% increase in the ecommerce conversion rate of the site
- 48% increase in ecommerce revenue
These metrics make a strong case for the improvement of the branding, storytelling, and call to action strength of the new site. They represent the successful implementation of the many different requirements that were intertwined to make this project a testament to the incredible quality, attention to detail, and the enamoring story that Far Niente’s brands have to offer.