BUILT/

BUILT/ was a modern-day builders merchant, designed from the ground up to redefine the trade retail experience. As a pioneering entity in its industry, BUILT/ sought to break away from the traditional builders merchant model that failed to evolve despite changes in the service industry landscape.

The challenge BUILT/ faced was two-fold. Firstly, it was a new entrant in an established market with well-entrenched competitors like its own parent company, the Travis Perkins Group and its 26 brands. Secondly, they needed to deliver a consistent and seamless customer experience across both digital and physical channels, in line with their goal of becoming an omnichannel business. They needed a partner to help them develop their brand, create a seamless customer experience, and establish a strong market presence.

Our approach to meeting these challenges involved close collaboration with BUILT/'s leadership team. We aimed to fully understand their vision and their audiences' journeys. With this knowledge, we employed an iterative process to shape the user experience, optimise purchase paths, and improve conversion rates. Our overarching goal was to create an industry-leading experience.

Understand deeply the needs, pains, attitudes, and motivations of customers and employees experiencing the BUILT/ brand. Then, with this knowledge, define leading experiences to make BUILT/ category leaders.

We conducted comprehensive research including focus groups and customer interviews to understand BUILT/'s audience, developing customer and employee journeys. Once the journeys were defined, we then looked at created user stories to fully map out all of the touchpoints leveraging technology to increase efficiency. We incorporated technology in a way that either assisted customers and employees in completing tasks or remained invisible, blending seamlessly into the BUILT/ environment.

The result was an optimised, industry-leading customer and employee experience that boosted efficiency and engagement. From both employee and customer perspectives, the experiences reduced time on mundane tasks.

The objective was to grow the BUILT/ brand and ensure its visibility across all channels. What we were provided was a logo, font, some colours, and graphical elements, so we needed to expand this suite of items so the brand could live and breathe in the real world and online.

In response, we designed a modular Design System that allowed BUILT/ to maintain consistency and relevance across all channels. From responsive typography to iconography, no matter whether BUILT/ was experienced via the app right to the drive-thru click-and-collect warehouse experience it always maintained the same aesthetic and feeling. We also led a range of marketing initiatives, such as creating monthly campaigns that raised brand awareness, email automation, and a 600-page catalogue to increase BUILT/'s physical presence.

These strategies led to a significant increase in brand awareness for BUILT/ and established them with a market presence that rivalled long-established brands in their vicinity.

The aim was to create a unique retail design that promoted rapid walk-in purchases, reduced the need for customer parking, and promoted a breadth of product types (small stores and heavy side), whilst enabling an easier employee experience picking and packing products.

We conducted extensive research and created many wireframes, physical cardboard cut-out prototypes, and even a 3D 1:1 scale VR experience to ensure the retail experience would work immediately. The designed retail layout maximised product placement in a smaller space, resulting in a super-efficient, user-friendly branch format. Similar to the design system, we ensured that the retail format was modular, meaning that any noticeable amendments to the store could be made with haste and accuracy. Colour-coded parking bays, automatic number plate recognition technology, and digital displays allowed us to identify, distribute, and serve customers unlike any experiences ever seen. The devil was in the detail and there was a lot of simplistically designed detail everywhere.

Compared to traditional trade counters and yards, BUILT/’s new retail design improved customer experience, promoting rapid purchases and increasing efficiency. But not only that, the cost to serve customers was dramatically reduced by the new format as the employee experience was optmised also for efficiency.

The goal was to create a go-to-market strategy to help BUILT/ penetrate the market and establish itself as a leader.

We devised a comprehensive strategy that included:

• A strong local supremacy plan
• Precision marketing
• Consistent monthly collateral
• Timely email automation
• A print catalogue for offline interaction.

As a result of our go-to-market strategy, BUILT/ became a £1m cash-based business within one year, surpassing Travis Perkins' other 26 brands.

In just one year, BUILT/ transformed from a logo into a fully-fledged brand, with a scalable design system across the physical and digital spectrum. Our efforts significantly improved their customer and employee experiences, created memorable moments, and helped BUILT/ establish a robust market presence.