AYLA NY
Fine Jewelry Handmade in New York.
Assessing the state of things.
Ahuva Almagor founded fine jewelry brand AYLA New York in 2013. She had a logo she loved and a Squarespace website to sell her product via ecommerce, but had dreams of taking the brand further. An increasing part of the business was custom designs and her current website had no way to process those orders. They were done 100% manually.
Defining the goals of the business.
Ahuva wanted to set up the brand to grow over the next several years. She needed a website that was easier to scale and that had more flexibility for products, payments, and integrations.
Build a new website on a selling-based platform
Accommodate more varied and more secure payment methods
Be able to intake, quote, and process custom orders
Add gifting ability
Integrate selling on social platforms
Set up to grow the brand via social, newsletters, etc.
Getting organized.
The product catalog had previously been small enough to manage ad-hoc, but was quickly growing. In order to truly scale the business, we needed to be more organized.
I developed a ‘source of truth’ spreadsheet and added every product name and type, description, price, and SKUs. I also included for each product the images that were on file, records of the SEO description, and collections and tags associated with it. This spreadsheet quickly became the single most valuable asset and the necessary foundation. I was then able to standardize everything from product names, descriptions, disclaimers, etc.
I also set up a jointly shared file structure that held all the imagery and assets by item type and product name. All files were renamed to a standardized naming convention to help with organization and SEO.
Developing a brand.
Next it was time to make it beautiful. The AYLA NY logo had previously been developed, but the brand had no additional standards, colors, or assets. I standardized and versioned the logo for different applications. Then pulling from the logo and with additional exploration, I codified primary and secondary colors and fonts.
While I encouraged Ahuva to get professional photography to better highlight the products and brand, it wasn’t something that would be immediately available. So we kept the homepage simple and elegant and supplemented product shots with personal photos, with the goal of adding more editorial photography in the future.
Getting down to it.
The new website was built using Shopify. Because there was so much standardization that had happened when collecting details of the current catalog, there was no easy button to transfer all the products from Squarespace to Shopify, so each product was added individually.
The new platform allowed for many other new features, all customized to AYLA’s needs:
Selling via Google, Facebook, & Instagram
Ability to save items to a wishlist and store the wishlist with a customer account
Ask a question directly from each product page or via chat
Accept special instructions during checkout, such as a special size or a gift message
Accept new and unconventional payment methods such as Affirm (pay over time), Venmo, and Cash app
Purchase, deliver, and redeem gift cards
Text notifications for shipment tracking
Tags and collections to help feature specific seasonal and special interest products
Customization for customization.
The biggest single piece of site customization was to integrate custom design work. I built a front-facing intake form to capture relevant details. Once received, AYLA NY could calculate a quote that would be sent back to the customer via email. If the customer accepted, they could convert the quote into an order and complete payment. The entire process was automated and captured securely using the same payment and fulfillment systems as standard products already in the catalog. To make this a seamless process required additional plug-ins and custom HTML.
Putting it out into the world.
The moment of launch is always nerve-wracking, but it went relatively smoothly. Over the course of several days I monitored:
Domain transfer
Site indexing and SEO
Payment processing
Made sure selling channels (Google, Instagram, Facebook) were connected and syncing
Following through.
AYLA NY’s product catalog has grown by 25% in one year since the launch of the new platform. I continue to maintain the product catalog, which now includes more than 100 items and over 1,500 variants amongst those items. I provided documentation of best practices for maintaining the site and adding new products for whomever may take up the work in the future.
True to her goal of putting herself out there more, I helped Ahuva design and implement monthly newsletters to send to customers. She has since added a dedicated content marketer to her arsenal, which has dramatically increased her social media presence.