Home Focus Unveil New eCommerce Store
Monsoon Consulting are excited to announce the launch of the new Home Focus at Hickeys website powered by Magento, Storyblok and Hyvä. Creating a new digital flagship for Ireland’s leading home furnishing brand.
Legendary Irish brand Home Focus by Hickeys, a staple in Ireland’s retail landscape since 1940 with 13 stores throughout Ireland has just launched its brand new website and digital flagship.
Home Focus which offer a wide range of fabrics, ready-made curtains, curtain poles, blinds, bedding, haberdashery & craft supplies and are now embarking on their next journey into eCommerce with their new, powerful and immersive eCommerce site.
The new site offers a wealth of cutting-edge features, intelligent product categorisation, and attribute filtering along with overall performance improvements to enrich the customer experience.
Monsoon Consulting has been working with the team at Hickeys on a wide range of project services including; updating the design, UX and UI, redeveloping and upgrading the application software from Magento 1 to the latest version of Magento 2.
Moreover, we have incorporated the new, innovative Hyvä Frontend Theme for Home Focus to transform the power of Magento and generate fast page load speeds and SEO benefits.
In addition, the new site provides key new eCommerce and multi-channel features including:
- Click & Collect
- Reserve Online & Pay in Store
- Reserve In-Store
Also of note, is Monsoon’s continued partnership and implementation of StoryBlok for Home Focus. Our team at Monsoon created a unique and immersive “Shop the Look ” feature utilising the powerful content management solution offered by Storyblok, merging and bringing together all the unique content and imagery from the brand with the specific product information from an eCommerce perspective.
Monsoon Consulting has improved the speed of the site with the following cutting edge solutions and innovative approach from our design & development team:
- Implementation of Hyvä theme. This has reduced the amount of CSS & JavaScript needed for the site.
- Lazyloading and optimising all imagery on the site.
- CDN and the performance optimisations with Cloudflare.
- Optimised Loading of 3rd party scripts.
- New and improved homepage design.
- Improved UX for the site header, catalogue and checkout.
- Integrated with Storyblok headless CMS for easy-to-manage content of landing pages.
- Storyblok has the only real Visual Editor available for CMS to give instant feedback on changes (For more on Monsoon’s partnership with Storyblok please see our recent blog post)
- Developed several compatibility modules including for the blog.
- Huge SEO improvement due to amazing new Page Speed Scores.
- Multi-store, multi-theme utilising the Luma to Hyvä re-theming approach.
Commenting on the site and eCommerce solution, Alastair Brodie, Commercial Director of Monsoon Consulting said:
Our team is very proud of the work we have achieved with Hickeys & Home Focus, taking this iconic Irish brand on the next chapter of their eCommerce journey.
Our team continues to push the boat out with innovative solutions working alongside our key eCommerce partners Hyvä and Storyblok, as well as Magento.”
We are very excited to work with Home Focus and support them on their journey ahead.
Monsoon Consulting is Ireland’s only Adobe Gold Solution Partner, focusing on delivering best-in-class B2B and B2C eCommerce solutions to large companies such as Uniphar PLC, Sysco (Pallas Foods), Topline, Heat Merchants Group, One4All and Central Bank of Ireland.
The team at Monsoon provides a full-service offering from business consultancy & strategic planning, UX & UI creative design, development & engineering, Infra & Dev ops to a dedicated Support team, offering 24×7 critical application support.
For more information on our Enterprise Magento Acceleration product, “Apex”
For more information on how Monsoon Consulting can help your business online, please get in touch with [email protected] or call +353 (0)1 4750066
