A Professional Makeup Brand Website Designed for the Spotlight

OVERVIEW

Ben Nye is one of the leading manufacturers of theatrical, television, and special effects cosmetics. Founded in 1967 and family run, they have an incredible customer base but their marketing was a bit behind the times. Limited to mostly trade shows and by word of mouth, Ben Nye came to us to help make a dramatic change to their website, striving to make it as visually pleasing as their products.

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

+95%
Avg. session duration
-40%
Bounce rate
+122%
Sessions
+94%
Organic search traffic

Ben Nye’s old website was not responsive on mobile devices,
which was a big usability problem for their target audience.

Discovery

We spent a great deal of time in discovery with Ben Nye. We conducted stakeholder interviews, toured their office and manufacturing facility, learned the full history of their company culture and ethos, and talked at length about the current website and the improvements they wanted to make.

Part of Ben Nye’s claim to fame is their incredible Banana Powder, which was made popular by Kim Kardashian after her makeup artist credited it as the key product used for her contouring. That mention drove a lot of new attention and business to Ben Nye, and they wanted to capitalize on the momentum and convert new customers to additional products.

There were several goals we set during our discovery with Ben Nye. Ben Nye’s old website was not responsive, which was a huge problem when it came to usability. Historical trends have shown that websites within the makeup and beauty industry receive between 70-80% of traffic from mobile devices. This meant Ben Nye was missing out on a lot of opportunities by only having the desktop version of the site available for those visiting on mobile phones.

Besides not being responsive, the previous design reflected the aesthetic of a printed product catalog rather than a website, so we made it a top priority to create a contemporary and modern design for Ben Nye. Lastly, since Ben Nye doesn’t sell products directly to customers, it was a priority for visitors to be able to quickly and easily find the 3rd party online or retail store nearest to them so they could make a purchase.

UX Strategy

There was a lot of work to be done during the UX strategy phase. With a wealth of knowledge from our discovery phase, the next step in the process was to take that information and leverage it to create wireframes that best accomplished our goals.

While creating wireframes, our focus was on guiding visitors on an intentional journey through the site. Specifically with the homepage, laying out the foundation of our navigation, intentionally placing calls to action (CTAs), and prioritizing content was all part of the UX strategy we put together. It took a very thoughtful and careful approach with lots of knowledge and empathy for Ben Nyes' target audience.

The product pages were another area that required a lot of heavy lifting in terms of UX strategy. It was a delicate balancing act of planning where to put compelling visuals and which information to prioritize on the information-dense page.

Build

With a strong UX strategy in place, we began skinning the wireframes by adding color, imagery, and carefully selected fonts. With Ben Nye's history in theater and television makeup, we wanted to create a bold, cinematic design to draw visitors in. However,we didn’t want to go full dark mode, as too much text on dark backgrounds can be a strain to read, so to strike a balance, we paired lots of white to compliment the black.

For the site build, we leveraged the power of Woocommerce, which is traditionally an ecommerce platform. Although Ben Nye doesn’t yet sell products directly on their website, they hope to in the near future, plus the structure of presenting their products is similar to a typical ecommerce store. The biggest difference was that we chose to drive visitors to the store locator rather than having visitors add products to their cart.

For the store locator, we built an easily managed system allowing Ben Nye to add stores on the site either individually or through a CSV import. Visitors can then search for a nearby retail store by address, city, state, or zip code. Additionally, on the store locator page, they’re able to modify the radius of their search through a dropdown menu, giving them even more flexibility over their search results.

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Ben Nye’s new website put them in a position to be
able to speak as highly about their digital presence
as their customers speak about their makeup.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

With a fresh new website, Ben Nye has brought their digital presence into the modern era. In love with their new site, the team at Ben Nye has been able to take advantage of the buzz around their products and leverage their new marketing tool (at trade shows and beyond)!

VIEW SITE