Online revenue increased by 191%
Diversification into online retail
Touchay’s is a family-run catering business owned by two professionally trained chefs. They have been successfully catering for weddings and events for over twenty-five years. Touchays have been a partner with Oak Creative for 5 years.
Retail overview: Online food retailer offering high end food delivered to your home. Sunday lunch, Christmas dinner, afternoon tea to treat box gift sets. Prepared by a prestigious multi award-winning caterer in Kent.
How did the diversification into online retailing begin?
Covid 19 was putting pressure on Touchays to diversify into online retailing because the original business model was at risk. With weddings and any kind of live events postponed, Touchays were left without any events to cater for throughout 2020. The vision to bring high end, award winning catering to your door was born. Having worked with Touchays for 5 years prior, Oak Creative integrated an e-commerce facility to their website. Whilst the core product remained the same for Touchays, the marketing, online merchandising and delivery logistics were entirely new so it was a team effort to get these components working seamlessly.
What was involved to deliver this project?
Firstly, the new retail offering needed an identity so together we decided to create the sub brand ‘Touchays Boxed’. This is where all the products available to purchase through the website would be listed. A bespoke pop out feature was implemented featuring the new sub brand Touchays Boxed to drive traffic to the shop area in the short term.
After some careful and considered planning, Oak Creative set to work creating bespoke tabs for each product areas, to detail delivery information, allergy information and FAQs are easily accessible during the customer journey. This level of detail and information helps to convert browsers to buyers as any questions are answered. We also created multiple categories for navigation, to help the user find their goal quickly. The users preferences and personalisation was key to getting this user journey right.
In terms of delivery, we developed and implemented a bespoke delivery fee calculator for each product range, using map design interface. Delivery fees vary per product range as some products available for UK wide delivery, whilst perishable produce is only available for local delivery or collection.
For Touchays to monitor their orders, there is a backend order dashboard. All customer communications such as email confirmations/invoices are automated, to reduce administrative tasks of the online retail offering. This also assists with stock taking, inventories and sales analysis.
Oak Creative conducted a remote training session for Touchays team members to learn how to navigate the content management system and edit/update products themselves on their new website as their range expands.
What happened once the new e-commerce site went live?
Once the core project was delivered, Oak Creative pro-actively assisted Touchay’s to maximise the results of their investment. Once all the hard work has been put in during set up, it’s crucial to communicate it and start generating orders! Oak Creative produce all of Touchays on and offline seasonal advertisement designs, such as Christmas campaigns or Valentines Day. We also helped Touchays set up social media creator Canva, to generate professional and consistent social media content themselves in-house. Finally we advised Touchays to take advantage of local support such as Produced in Kent network and they have signed up to part of the Help Kent Buy Local community.
Touchays received a 191% increase in overall online revenue. The seasonal products were a great success, with a Christmas Dinner becoming the second highest selling product across the range.
