With millennials rewriting the book on gearing up for child-rearing, Kids2 faced a retail partner ultimatum: evolve or get left behind.
Generational Shift
Integrated marketing and e-commerce that engage millennial parents where they shop
The Ask
Kids2 needed a strategy for reaching a new generation of parents who were changing the rules of retail.
The Kids2 family of brands has been inventing and reinventing developmental and entertaining baby gear for nearly 50 years. Headquartered in Atlanta, they have customers in more than 90 countries.
The Answer
We created an e-commerce experience that got Kids2 off the shelf and into shoppers’ hearts and carts.
- Brand Design Systems
- Competitive & Industry Research
- Customer Research & Journey Mapping
- IA & Experience Maps
- UI Visual Design
- UX Design & Prototyping
- UX Optimization & Strategy
- UX Research & Testing
- E-commerce Platforms
Great expectations
Unlike Kids2’s traditional customer base, millennial parents were discovering baby products on social media and using mobile devices to do in-aisle research. To offer these shoppers the immediate, emotional brand interactions they craved – and convert those moments into trackable sales for retail partners – Kids2 needed a robust online strategy.
We built a best-in-class digital experience that gave birth to higher volumes of loyal new Kids2 customers.
Play Video
Playtime: Nurturing millennial parents requires a strategically optimized, emotionally engaging website. For bonus points, add photos of adorable babies.
$2.5M
Revenue impact in Q1 post-launch
51%
Increase in organic website traffic
26%
Reduction in call center and social media customer service tickets
Millennial crib sheet
Before they could transform their marketing, Kids2 needed to clear up internal misconceptions around millennial parents and how they shop the category.
Initial research enabled us to plot detailed customer journey and experience maps. Putting the team in millennials’ shoes, we homed in on three problem areas Kids2 could help them solve:
- knowing what baby gear they needed;
- helping them choose among brands that offer that gear; and
- providing product support.
These became our opportunities for designing digital experiences to inform, engage, and win the hearts of these shoppers.
Millennial crib sheet
Before they could transform their marketing, Kids2 needed to clear up internal misconceptions around millennial parents and how they shop the category.
Initial research enabled us to plot detailed customer journey and experience maps. Putting the team in millennials’ shoes, we homed in on three problem areas Kids2 could help them solve:
- knowing what baby gear they needed;
- helping them choose among brands that offer that gear; and
- providing product support.
These became our opportunities for designing digital experiences to inform, engage, and win the hearts of these shoppers.
Bringing up baby gear
By thinking like a world-class, online merchant, Kids2 let go of its reliance on brick-and-mortar-centric tactics and became an indispensable retail partner.
We helped Kids2 roll out tools that quickly scaled up content delivery.
- Rich digital libraries of product photos, descriptions, and info sheets enabled Kid2 to offer options for shopping by brand, category, age range, developmental stage, and more.
- The new information architecture let Kids2 serve up relevant search results and drive global shoppers to the appropriate retail partner to complete their purchases.
- We created “digital endcaps” that tied into buying guides. These blended content and shopability to help fuel massive lifts in organic site traffic – no paid media required.
With UX design and content strategy supporting shoppers’ path-to-purchase, site traffic went up, call center tickets went down, and retail partner satisfaction increased significantly.
Parental support
Customer-first thinking also helped Kids2 develop touchpoints for making millennial parents feel seen, heard, and valued.
To meet new generational expectations, we created emotionally engaging, frictionless paths to connect millennial parents with relevant digital content. These included:
- Using responsive design so parents could shop however and wherever they preferred, regardless of device type.
- Collecting reviews so shoppers could share product experiences with each other.
- Integrating CRM tools to support personalized marketing campaigns.
Family brand
Ultimately, interacting with millennials online also raised Kids2’s visibility as head of the brand family – and led them to refresh their own look and feel.
To pull all the pieces of the project together, we needed millennials to connect the lesser-known Kids2 name with their more well-known baby gear product brands. We gave Kids2 a clean design update, complete with mood boards, logo treatments, and color palette. This brought about a visual harmony that let the whole brand family share one site while still maintaining unique identities.
“Everybody [at Kids2] has remarked that ‘It feels like [Launch is] part of the same team.’ In our culture, that’s the highest compliment. Everybody here is so impressed by the level of attention to detail.