WoolOvers re-launch 3 new brands in 12 weeks

Woolovers are a British lifestyle brand who have been designing and selling natural knitwear successfully since 1989. They migrated to Remarkable Commerce in 2016, choosing the Remarkable platform to run their high-performance brand site and to enable the rapid launch of dedicated international sites for Ireland, Russia, Australia, and mainland Europe. In recent years, the WoolOvers Group has become a predominantly online retailer.

Since then they have gone from strength to strength seeing a 45% sales growth across International storefronts and 73% sales growth in 2020. Their online success enabled them to acquire Pure Collection, which is one of the largest online retailers of cashmere. Remarkable also re-platformed Pure in 2020, migrating them from a different custom platform solution, to prepare the business for rapid growth. 

In 2022 they also added an activewear brand Roama to the group's portfolio, which offers sustainable fitness wear for women. Roama was launched as a separate storefront, yet is managed from the central WoolOvers group platform admin. 

Woolovers are now pleased to announce the acquisition and launch of three new retail brands into their group, which have been launched within the WoolOvers group’s eCommerce infrastructure. The three brands are Expert Verdict, Blooms and Scotts of Stow - all previously part of the Scotts family of brands.

Expert Verdict https://www.expertverdict.com/ is a lifestyle brand selling mostly garden furniture, as well as electronics and homeware products, Bloom is an online faux flower and plant seller https://bloom.uk.com/ and Scotts of Stow https://www.scottsofstow.co.uk/ which is a long established business selling everything for the kitchen, home and garden. 

These three brands have a strong customer base and a heritage story which WoolOvers is hoping to refresh, modernise and begin driving forwards through their successful experience of digital marketing.

Excitingly, this provides a great opportunity for Woolovers to expand its offering into different product areas like homeware and hard goods and provides a pleasant product synergy for its existing customers. 

The re-platforming project for the three brands took twelve weeks to complete - proving how quickly new brands and storefronts can be added to client portfolios. The website's UX was based on the Roama site code, this accelerated approach allowed Remarkable to work at speed, using the previous BigCommerce sites as reference points for styling. 

Each website is integrated with third parties already in use by the WoolOvers group, these include Adyen and PayPal payment gateways,  Feefo for product reviews and Ometria will be used for marketing campaigns. As well as tightly integrating with WoolOvers' custom-built internally-managed ERP solution.  

The biggest challenge faced was product data and getting a different type of product data structure (for hard goods and homeware in particular) to fit into an existing fashion and apparel structure. With the time constraints - Woolovers had to prioritise what was essential and launched as an MVP (minimal viable product), to ensure timelines could be met. Specifically, when a retailer has many different forms of products, the attributes and data fields can be very varied, which makes the product catalogue structure difficult to architect. In addition, when a brand is acquired and product data is inherited, it can often be structured differently to the other brands. 

Crucially all of the new websites, alongside Roama, Woolovers and Pure Collection can be managed in a single admin by the Woolovers Group - for ease and efficiency. This allows the team to manage products, collections, promotions and trading activity for all brands from the same portal. 

“What's been good about working with Remarkable on this project is how flexible they have been - they worked at speed and just were open to embracing the opportunity that lies ahead. Whenever we have launched new storefronts with Remarkable - the average project is 4-6 weeks.” 

Mike Stainthorpe, Performance Marketing Director at WoolOvers Group

"We are extremely proud of the team who delivered the three sites within twelve weeks and cannot wait to watch these brands blossom. WoolOvers are a fantastic client with big ambitions and we look forward to supporting their growth, by ensuring stability and providing highly customised solutions."

Steve Cart, Operations Director at Remarkable Commerce