NEOM Wellbeing is a multi-award winning, luxury brand that specialises in a range of holistic health and wellness products, from candles, diffusers and essential oils, to bath products, body and skincare.
Considered a lifestyle brand, NEOM offers more to its customers than the purchase of a product. Contributing to its buyers’ way of life, NEOM helps them to prioritise self care by boosting moods, encouraging better sleep, reducing stress and more inspiring energy - all with a focus on the environment.
What started in a former journalist’s kitchen, because of her own struggles and stressful lifestyle, has now won numerous awards and is one of the most recognised brands in the lifestyle and wellbeing sector.
When we made our proposal, NEOM’s B Corp certification was one of our key considerations. We wanted to make sure the NEOM team knew that we wanted to pull in the same direction - and achieved that by ensuring that we made offsetting the carbon footprint of the development process a key part of the proposal. In addition, rather than look to tree planting, which can lead to mixed results, Velstar invested in the restoration of blue ecosystems (specifically a super important, if perhaps not attractively named, area of mangrove swamp). This investment was designed to quickly offset the build, making it entirely carbon neutral, but will also hopefully continue removing carbon for many years to come.
With the NEOM’s website accounting for just under 50% of its total sales, the goal of this project was to:
- Upgrade the D2C websites (US, EU and UK) from Shopify 1.0 to 2.0.
- Deliver a mobile-first, optimised, best-in-class website to ensure the best UX possible
- Deliver a site-wide visual refresh
- Work towards speed and performance improvements by using best-practice coding standing and build the brand new theme.
In addition to building the brand new theme, on the chosen platform of Shopify 2.0, a handful of upgrades also took place to ensure all goals were met. This included:
- A full redesign of the store
- Front and back end development
- App migration
- SEO reviews and implementation of best practice fixes
To start the design process, our team aligned their vision with NEOM, working closely with its style and branding.
As part of the brand refresh, we created a completely bespoke Shopify store with an overarching goal to drive conversion, expand internationally and continue to build upon the brand’s fast-paced growth.
The design team were able to complete and deliver this redesign using a four-step process, ensuring reviews and approvals were at every stage. With the enhancement of Shopify 2.0, all sections could be reused throughout the site. With an emphasis on a simple, informative purchase journey, we were able to produce a seamless, community led user experience.
In addition to the full redesign of the store, Velstar was able to make some cost-effective changes to current formats, including a custom gift builder. Our development team was able to build this functionality directly into the Shopify 2.0 theme, removing the third-party app costs, allowing this to be handled internally.
Another feature built into the theme was the wellbeing and scent finder quiz, this again was something that could be handled internally, removing the need for a third-party app or cost.
A further focus for this project was to upgrade the checkout experience for customers, from ‘checkout liquid’ which is due to expire this year, to ‘checkout extensibility’, which email marketing provider, Ometria was integrated to, as well as the customer loyalty and engagement app, LoyaltyLion.
Metafields were also drawn into the product template, having previously been handled by a third-party app, there was a view to strip it out, and replace all metafields with Shopify native ones.
A big part of this project was also to replace soon to be expired, Shopify Scripts with Shopify Functions, offering better performance, allowing for five automatic discounts to be active at one time and due to the speed at which it executes code, Shopify Functions can accommodate flash sales without compromising performance.
The Neom migration was an excellent illustration of the importance of getting the fundamentals right when looking to preserve or improve visibility during any major change to a site and its architecture.
For the most part, the upgrade to Shopify 2.0 was pretty ‘by-the-book’, we established a timeline for SEO auditing and research to be conducted in parallel with the ongoing design and development work - this included:
- A full content audit
- A review of the site’s hierarchy and architecture
- Keyword research
- The creation and optimisation of page titles and meta descriptions
- A full technical SEO review of the new theme (including core web vitals)
- Redirect mapping (new and legacy)
- Implementation of technical SEO fixes
- Go-live checks and technical SEO audit (hreflang, redirects etc.)
- A post launch crawl to ensure nothing had been missed
While a 2.0 upgrade doesn’t often throw up major technical issues, we believe that thoroughness is the best way to avoid mistakes.
One unique aspect of the move, however, was that it coincided with a decision by the brand to also change domain names - again, in order to avoid unforeseeable issues, we ensured that this initial domain redirect was implemented during the early stages of development, giving the redirects a chance to bed in prior to the move to 2.0.
Following the redesign, the website and the upgrade to the Shopify 2.0 platform, NEOM’s new website launched in May 2024.
By ensuring the brand’s style and personality is shown through its facelift, NEOM was able to keep its branding reflective of its identity.
Part of the importance of NEOM’s narrative is maintaining the image of the lifestyle it portrays, which has been achieved through the design and development process, executing changes to create the smoothest customer journey, resulting in conversions.
We look forward to seeing the results of the brand’s website transformation in the coming months.
