When aesthetics and efficiency go hand in hand

Norway's largest wine importer

When Vinmonopoly's import monopoly was rescinded in 1996, sommelier and chef Christopher Moestue was quickly on the ball. He thought the selection here was too poor — and took matters into his own hands. Since then, Moestue Grape Selections has been Norway's largest import company for wine, beer and spirits.

But unlike wine, their website hadn't matured well over the years.

The Necessary Insights

Through a preliminary project, we mapped target audiences and potential. Who are the users and what needs do they have? What needs Moestue has selves -- as administrators of the page?

Larger projects require a lot assay, and the existing solution was a jumble of subpages and menu structures. That's why we thoroughly went through Analytics and examined what people actually were interested in. where do they fall off and why?

The analysis helped the team concretize the core sites. That kind of concretization is perhaps especially important when you are going to talk to completely different audiences. Moestue is going to reach both Horeca, potential collaborators and connoisseurs, and that requires a smart, insight-based structure.

Simple but serious

An important step was to clean up and simplify. It was supposed to be cleaner and tighter, with big pictures and icons where it was allowed to be done.

We had to avoid overreading the user with text and information. Part of the key is to start with exactly the information most people are wondering about, while making more information easily accessible to particularly interested parties.

New Moestue.com is modern, lightweight and comfortable to look at — just check for yourself! The recognizable logo, which is important for them, was given a central place.

The customer showed us a lot of confidence and gave us relatively free leeway when it came to colors, shape and appearance. The most important thing was that it should show seriousness, professional knowledge and quality.

Saving work

The biggest challenge was of a technical nature. On Moestue's pages you can browse through hundreds of wines — and for each bottle you get information. Lots of information.

Wine is a product with extremely many attributes. Country of origin, alcohol percentage, appellation, freshness, sweetness, soils, grape type, you name it. And all this information is stored in InRiver, their product information management (PIM) system. Thus, we were totally dependent on a good integration towards this system.

This had to be created from scratch, and thanks to good dialogue with Moestue and their PIM partner, we were able to solve this well.

Now all the information is automatically loaded from the PIM and onto the website. This saves Moestue a lot of potential duplication work, as they do not need to enter the system or enter this manually. In addition, it looks very fresh!

Continuous development

SEO and content analysis It has also been central throughout the project. By having figures on which blog articles have done well, we also know what they should produce more of.

And because we know which products are most popular, we can optimize specifically for them. This is a work that is going to continue going forward.

The beginning of the collaboration has been exciting and fruitful, and we look forward to its continuation. Going forward, there will be more B2B functionality, more wine and more fun.

This is probably just the start for new Moestue.com.