How We Built KubiHoney

Luxury lingerie retailer KubiHoney gets the Harpers treatment

Who is KubiHoney?

KubiHoney is a luxury lingerie retailer. They specialise in providing the ultimate in womens underwear at affordable prices. This was KubiHoney’s first venture into the online market and they turned to Harpers to realise their dream of operating on a global scale.

Although new to the online space the team at KubiHoney were clearly very passionate about what they did so Harpers was only too happy to help them achieve their goals!

What was the brief?

KubiHoney wanted a website that clearly communicated the luxuriousness and quality of their brand and products. They also wanted advice and help on setting up e-commerce functionality, drop shipping and online customer service operations.

Above all KubiHoney wanted to a fast performing website while still using their high resolution image content, something we could easily achieve with a bit of TLC.

How did we do it?

First we liased with KubiHoney’s wholesale provider and grabbed all the imagery and CSV stock list files so we new what we were working with. Then we set about building a site that refelected the luxury nature of the KubiHoney brand giving pride of place to the fantastic imagery available.

To create a seamless shopping experience we planned on creating slide in shopping cart functionality so that the customers could manage their orders on the fly.

The end result

Home is where the heart is

A simple entry page to the website shows off the quality of the KubiHoney brand with a high impact image.

Lower down on the page we show off the latest products and also the “look of the month” featuring a hand picked ensemble for users looking for a total look.

The Product Page

In keeping with the minimal design we feature the product in hi-res format with size and colour options for easy purchase. The image can be zoomed in on to inspect the item in further detail.

On adding an item to their shopping basket a slide panel pops out to show the customer what is currently in their cart and from here products ca be managed by removing or updating the quantity.

Top Notch Tablet View

Websites need to look great on all devices so great care was taken to make sure KubiHoney looked just as good on tablet devices such as iPads.

At this resolution we switch out the menu for a slide in panel showing the different pages available.

The Mobile Minx

For that busy lady on the go we needed KubiHoney to look great on mobile while still being easy to use. We dropped down the amount of products per column and kept all functionality off screen for ese of use.

Because over 50% of the browser market is now mobile making sure KubiHoney looked great at this size was key to a successful design.

As with the tablet version we kept all functionality such as page menu, filter system and cart off screen until the user indicates they want to see that by clicking one of the icons.

The Nerdy Stuff

Stats

As part of building this website from scratch we integrated several functionalities to give a seamless shopping experience to the users. Great care and attention was paid to the speed and efficiency of the site code to get the best results possible. Here is some of the stuff we did…

E-commerce functionality

We integrated WooCommerce, the web’s leading e-commerce plugin, removed a lot of the unnecessary scripts that come with it and set up new styling for all the product and category pages. We also built a filter system so that users could filter the products by size, style, type, fabric etc.

DevOps

We setup KubiHoney on our lightning network and configured it for use with MariaDB, Nginx and Varnish. This is why the pages load so fast, because all of the pages are in fact static HTML pages rather than PHP pages making database calls every load/change.

Scripts

We created lightweight alternatives to using jQuery for animations by sticking with CSS transformations for things such as the sidebar or filter menu sliding in. We also optimised the WooCommerce functionality so that it cut back on the number of calls it was needing to make to the WordPress core.

Optimisation

We wrote some custom rules for KubiHoney so that NGX PageSpeed (a module for Nginx made by Google) minified and optimised stylesheets and scripts on the fly. We also dealt with the images so that they were losslessly optimised and in a proper proportioned resolution for web viewing.