Bang & Olufsen have an unrivalled history in product design and innovation. When they came to us they lacked digital direction and were struggling to stand out. Our job was to find a way to unlock their brand value through design, across the entire customer experience.

With a small team, we undertook a rapid immersion phase. We visited the factories, absorbed the history and understood the culture.

We defined a solid foundation on how better to express their brand across the entire customer experience. Within 6 weeks, we took all of our thinking and shaped a working prototype, through key designs with a focus on brand expression. This was our springboard from which to dive into building and evolving the experience. Just 10 weeks later, we delivered and re-launched Bang-olufsen.com.

We leveraged 100 years of history by connecting their product language with digital language, creating a connected experience with one clear voice. By listening to their design philosophy, we distilled their unique knowledge and thinking into an iconic, minimalist, graphical design language. We cut the clutter and honed small details to create the iconic Bang & Olufsen sense of luxurious simplicity. We undesigned everything. So that what’s left, is outstanding.

Through deep analytics across thousands of pages, we found that the longer customers stayed, the more likely they were to convert. We needed to keep our audience of Creative Curators engaged for longer. To do this, we had to find a unique way to tell our stories. So, we redefined the rules and carved our own category. We shared our rich, interactive, engaging narratives with direct paths to purchase, through lifestyle-led shoppable stories. We like to call it, Slow Commerce.

From day one, our strategy has been to unlock the ‘luxury delta’ that allows Bang & Olufsen to create lifestyle products of a luxury premium. As digital drives the luxury sector to pivot towards new audiences, new behaviours and new ways of operating, it was critical that we delivered a future-proof platform capable of scaling across the Bang & Olufsen ecosystem.

We identified our audience of Creative Curators and equipped them with the stories they wanted to share. Golden gems of information that only true insiders would know. We welcomed them in to our world of Bang & Olufsen. A new kind of luxury — one that’s inclusive, not exclusive.

Our immersive, data driven, flagship store integrates brand with commerce through storytelling that’s built for a global luxury audience — brought to consumers through modern, responsive engineering.

In August 2018, we spent four days in Struer, Denmark, to immerse ourselves into the world Bang & Olufsen. We trawled the extensive archives, toured the factories, and met the people who make this company truly unique. We picked apart the DNA of Bang & Olufsen to reveal the core of the brand.

We then distilled this thinking and applied it across the brand experience to create an iconic, truly connected design and product language. We applied this thinking to global navigations, anchor links, controls other functional items to mirror the luxurious simplicity that can be found in all Bang & Olufsen products. We created a bespoke brand motion language, that was inspired by actual gestures of human interaction with their physical products. The continuity of language, between product and digital design, gives our audience confidence, guides them through the experience, and offers little of moments of personality and delight.

Just like a physical store, the online flagship store acts like a shop window. The design system allows us to ‘merchandise’ the experience with campaign-led visuals, creating a recognisable thread in key positions throughout the customer journey, across the entire experience.

From the beginning, it’s been a balancing act between brand expression and digital optimisation. You couldn’t have one without the other. Our design approach aimed for both.

Speaking the same visual language creates a feeling of comfort and familiarity with our Creative Curators, whilst importantly feeling like Bang & Olufsen. Because combining product and experience language creates a consistent brand voice. The motion language gives confidence, clarity and guides the user.

We’re not only telling their stories from a brand point of view, we’re also using design to add a level of practically and usability that the space demands. We’re already seeing the huge impact these changes have made.

Unlocking value from launch: One week after launch our performance metrics are justifying all our efforts —

- Conversion +23%

- Revenue +42%

- Average Order Value +27%

People who view our shoppable stories:

• are 80% more likely to add to basket

• view 70% more pages in a session

• view 3x more pages in a month

• are twice as likely to ‘find a store’ after they’ve been to a story page