Lifetime Brands | Colorhaus Design

Migrating a giant.

Lifetime Brands is the parent company to numerous home goods-focused brands such as KitchenAid, Farberware, Rabbit, and over fifteen more.

They came to my agency, BVA, for the largest contract and web migration in Shopify history. Lifetime had the difficult challenge of needing to migrate multiple sites from differing ecommerce platforms into one central theme on Shopify. I was fortunate enough to play an instrumental role in this transition, leading the design and architecture for a robust UI design system and bespoke theme template that was utilized for ten brands. Colloquially known as the ‘super-theme’, this resulted in the successful launch of each brand with some of the most in-depth theme customizations in Shopify history.

Deliverables / Responsibilities

Design System
Strategy
UX / UI
Prototyping
Information Architecture

Brands

The Process

Scoping & Analytics

Information Architecture

Design System Implementation

Core Templates Design

Bespoke Customizations

Scoping & Analytics

Challenge:
Organize and create a system to implement nine unique brands onto one unified theme template in a six month timeframe.

Solution:
Working with the development and strategy teams, we crafted a thorough design system following atomic design principles in order to build a complex theme that could achieve success with each brand and their respective needs. I devised a series of modules and components that would be brand agnostic, and then designed a UI kit for each brand to create a process for quick UI implementations across the global theme.

Wireframing

UI Kit

Navigation & Information Architecture

Challenge:
The first part of tackling the Lifetime project required a re-evaluation of all ten brands and their existing information architecture. Large product catalogs with legacy products had cluttered the shopping experience for users and the navigation needed to be adapted for brands with as few as ten products and brands with more than ten thousand.

Solution:
I optimized their category groupings and dropdown menu organization using analytical insights to reconstruct thought-out category groupings. I made a fully adminable megamenu dropdown system with over twenty unique dropdown iterations in order to allow for maximum efficiency in displaying product, category and internal links.

IA Chart

Main Navigation A – PlanetBox

Main Navigation B – Pfaltzgraff

Main Navigation A – Rabbit

Main Navigation A – Chefn

Product Page

Challenge:
As with all templates for the Lifetime design system, the product page needed to be designed to accommodate a wide feature set that enabled multiple shopping features for over thirty different types of products across ten brands. Multiple customizations and variant parameters were needed for success.

Solution:

I utilized a dual-template approach in organizing the necessary information fields for each product and designed out a throughly customizable PDP with multiple sections for displaying content and valuable product information that tied seamlessly into Shopify’s native CMS. I also incorporated custom fields to allow for full flexibility in marketing promotional messaging.

Pfaltzgraff

PlanetBox

Built NY

Rabbit

Collection Template

Challenge:
The diverse array of brands and product catalogs presented the largest challenge in the whole project. The client needed two separate templates to best facilitate the delineation between product catalogs with varying degrees of SKU and inventory size. As noted earlier – some catalogs ranged in the thousands while others were in the dozens.

Solution:

I devised a dual-template system that saw product tiles in the smaller inventory brands be larger, with more focus on imagery and content, and the larger brands present more products with a robust filtering system to ease shopping wayfinding for users. The more complex collection even required a further separation of product tiles from the product listing pages to upsell components throughout the rest of the site.

Pfaltzgraff

Rabbit

Fitz & Floyd Detail

Planetbox Detail

Homepage Template

Challenge:
Design Shopify modules for a homepage WYSIWYG editor that would benefit all ten brands.

Solution:
After careful client requirements gathering a scoping, I designed sixteen individual section components that included multiple product wayfinding and shopping sections, UGC content, and content-focused sections.