The Challenges

Rue Marengo co-founders came to us with an amazing product —classic, exquisitely designed, sterling silver jewelry that they wanted to share with the world. The challenge was to create a luxury brand from scratch, and to build an e-commerce website optimized for selling jewelry and with all the necessary functionality to allow the founders to run a successful online business.

Gaining Strategic Insights

The first phase consisted of laying down a solid foundation with brand strategy work. We used KiteComs’ MPAA method —a series of sessions with the client where we go in depth into their vision, their business needs and goals, and much more. This allowed us and the founders to gain clarity about the new brand, and gain valuable insights to start fleshing it out.

Bringing the Brand to Life

Once the strategic foundation was completed, we started translating our gained insights into a living brand. We worked on naming research and the development of a color palette, font pairings, and a logo.

Logo development took a couple of weeks as we iterated through countless explorations with shapes, typeface combinations, styles, symbols, and colors. One of the designers sketched a symbol based on a four-leaf clover, which evolved into a unique and delicate symbol which, along with a delicate serif font, would further solidify the personality and sophistication of the brand.

The color palette of the brand started as a combination of bluish-turquoise and a rich chocolate brown. It then evolved into a seafoam green with gold. In the end, we settled on a three-color palette consisting of a distinctive but soothing mint-macaron shade of green that would act as the main brand color; a complimentary bright lemony yellow to bring out the brand’s joie-de-vivre energy; and an intense French rose accent color. The initial gold is still used as an extension of the yellow for decorative elements. We also decided that the rich chocolate brown would be used only in the packaging of the most expensive items, as a mark of luxury for the most exclusive clients.

Finally, we worked with the Rue Marengo team on the packaging.

In all we ensured customers would enjoy a consistent branding experience throughout, and that the company would project the trustworthy image of an established luxury brand.

Building an E-Commerce Website Second to None

We designed the website in accordance with the Rue Marengo brand we had developed. We put strong emphasis on the quality of the photography given that it’s the only means for potential customers to judge the quality of the jewelry before purchasing. We ensured shoppers could navigate easily thanks to an intuitive menu, and a sitemap that included category pages, curated shops, and even the ability to search gifts by price. We also included search and filter functionality in the shop page, to allow shoppers to easily find the right product.

In summary, we equipped the website with all the bells and whistles an online jewelry store might need, such as comprehensive payment options (including payment in installments with PayPal), an extensive FAQ page, gift cards, integration with shipping software to streamline the shipping process, and much more.

We even set up a custom VoIP phone system for Rue Marengo’s customer service. That’s what we call a full e-commerce package (pun intended)!