Farmed-out Functionality

As it planned for the 2007 re-launch of its e-commerce site, beauty/skin care retailer Jurlique had as its primary goal a cost-effective website that was just as attractive, well-merchandised and easy to navigate as its bricks-and-mortar stores.

Lacking the IT resources to maximize performance, the company turned to New York-based Venda. The result, says senior interactive marketing manager Jeremy Goldman, is that Jurlique now has “a platform that we can continue to work on without having to create everything from scratch.”

As an in-house operation, the website did not have a lot of the features that drive traffic, conversion and revenue, says Venda CEO Jeffrey Max. “It was lacking search-engine optimization, personalization tools [and] the ability to merchandise the site based on the customer’s purchase history. All of these new and effective ways to merchandise product just didn’t exist in their platform.”

Venda, whose other retail clients include Urban Outfitters, The Body Shop and De Beers Diamonds, began rebuilding Jurlique’s e-commerce site in March 2007; Jurlique launched the first of three sites now running on the Venda platform that September. The original plan was to observe how that first site, which was focused on the U.S. market, performed. But things went so smoothly that Jurlique launched its U.K. and Australia sites the following month.

One major advantage of Venda’s single-platform, multi-site structure “is that we can treat each site as its own virtual store that we track individually,” Goldman says. “We do that because there are different promotional rules and delivery rates for each of our sites, and we can localize all the content to each individual market.” For instance, he says, “We can use the Queen’s English on one site and American sentence structure on another.”

Venda, he says, “handles everything related to the site. I don’t have to deal with multiple resource providers. I don’t have one agency doing e-commerce, another agency doing design.”

Jurlique began in Australia as a grower and distributor of organically produced herbs and flowers. It moved its corporate headquarters to Irvington, N.Y. in 2006, and currently operates approximately 100 retail stores.

According to Goldman, Venda’s out-of-the-box solution “has made it a lot easier for us to focus on the IT needs of our ‘real world’ stores” and features such as a loyalty program and an Internet radio program. Jurlique has been able to take advantage of not just Venda’s ability to customize to its specific needs, but also of e-commerce functionalities that Venda created for some of its other clients. “And that costs us a lot less than if we had developed that functionality internally,” Goldman says.

Generates word of mouth
Using the photo gallery functionality that Venda provided, Jurlique’s marketing department recently created an online contest that gave customers a chance to win a trip to the company’s two certified organic and biodynamic farms in the Adelaide Hills of south Australia. On those farms, the company grows 50 different varieties of plants and flowers — including lavender, rose, marshmallow, elder and calendula. Those crops, Goldman says, “provide the essential skin-replenishing energy within our products.”

And, since Jurlique does not advertise, the contest was a way to generate more positive word of mouth and enhance visibility for the brand, which also is sold in spas and specialty stores like Barneys, Blue Mercury, Space.NK and, beginning last fall, Sephora.

Venda also has provided Jurlique with the ability to more effectively micro-market its brand through electronic media. “We used to create one e-mail a month that was completely one big graphic image,” Goldman says. “But unless customers know who the sender is, they tend to have the automatic opening of images disabled. So we needed to give our customers more client-friendly e-mail. That was an extra step that we didn’t take when we ran the website because we just didn’t have the time, but it’s a necessary step to increase the ‘open rates’ of our e-mail campaigns.”

Many of Venda’s retail customers are able to achieve ROI “in as little as three to six months,” Max says. “When you have flat costs that are predictable with increasing revenue, you get a huge ROI. A well-run website is the cheapest doorfront in the world, and the highest-ROI doorfront in the world.”