Background
Scotts & Co are a leading UK mail-order retailer, having one of the strongest market portfolios of mail-order companies (Ancestral. Collections, Cucina Direct among others sit under the Scotts & Co umbrella) as well as a physical retail presence in the form of their flagship store, Scotts of Stow, based in the Cotswolds, which sells a variety of high-end home-products from the kitchen to the garden.
The challenge
As an established physical and online retailer, Scotts already had a significant amount of in-print catalogue literature to help leverage their individual brands, as well as functional e-commerce sites to act as direct revenue channels.
However, Scotts had no real app-store presence and, recognizing the increasing value (relative to traditional forms of search like Google) of app stores as a source of consumer discovery and engagement, wanted their brands to be seen on the app store, to extend the value of their mail-order brands.
They also wanted a straightforward way to convert existing mail-order and print-catalogue content into a digital format with the minimum of fuss. Nigel Swabey, President of the Scotts & Co group stated that part of the challenge was in finding a software solution that didn’t require a significant amount of resource investment in terms of staff and training to employ for these ends.
Finally, Scotts were keen on a solution that allowed for rather specific features especially important for catalogues: editioning (the editing of individual pages to keep the catalogues up to date) and general version control.
The solution
Initially, Swabey and his team showed considerable interest in a HTML5-based solution because of the platform-agnostisity, but decided on a YUDU app-based solution instead, because the HTML5 solution could not deliver their key aim: to maximise brand-awareness in the app stores.
As YUDU emphasizes an app-led approach for catalogues for these very reasons, Scotts found it a good fit. We were able to create 7 individually branded apps for 7 of the brands they owned, enhancing the discoverability of their entire portfolio in the process.
Two specific YUDU Publisher features were also vital in meeting requirements: The product overlay tool and SmartCat’s automated product SKU association linking, which allowed Scotts to automate the process of linking each and every product in all of their seven catalogues back to its relevant “click-to-buy” page on the e-commerce site itself.
Publisher’s pagination tools, which allows clients to individually switch in and out particular pages from an overall edition was highly praised as it meant Scotts could keep catalogues up to date by removing pages with products that were no longer sold, as well as fulfilling the more niche requirement of allowing Scotts to rebrand their cover-pages when appropriate. In conjunction with Publisher's version-control features, this meant their customers never had to encounter out-of-date material.