BUILDING A DIGITAL PLAYGROUND | ROARSOME

From Dragon's Den to Harrods... To Shopify

‍The Challenge

Squarespace is a great platform for smaller businesses, but can sometimes be restrictive and limit a brand’s ability to grow further. And so, a move from Squarespace to Shopify gives brands the opportunity to have more control whilst expanding on the tools they can use to build their site.  

In spite of these restrictions, Roarsome’s Squarespace site was packed with essential content, from vibrant product listings to blogs that inspired families to explore the outdoors, which they wanted to bring to their new site too. 

Additionally, Roarsome were also bringing with them some further ideas for their site now that the chains were off and they could trust in the help of an experienced development partner such as us. 

Brand and website uplift 

After our in-depth immersion session with the Roarsome team, it was clear that they wanted a site that displayed their brand and products through large imagery, videos and playful brand colours. The site was to display the fun that could be had in the products they sell, whilst also reassuring and informing the parents that would be making the purchases.

Roarsome had previously hired an illustrator to create a narrative for each of the “characters” that make up their clothing designs. However, these had not been front and centre on their site.

In fact, Roarsome had wanted to implement a shop by character navigation for some time, but had found no intuitive way to do so on Squarespace. Therefore, this was one of the main new opportunities they wanted to explore as part of their migration to Shopify, and we were more than happy to oblige.

The Solution

In order to ensure all content was moved across from Squarespace to Shopify safely, we had to roll up our sleeves and dive into the realms of Squarespace. 

With Squarespace lacking a direct export feature for blogs, we instead had to map out an efficient strategy for moving blogs to Shopify one by one. This, of course, took precision and a bit of creative problem-solving, to make sure all of Roarsome’s resources were ready to inspire new outdoor adventures, right from their revamped site.

‍Creating a fun site for children and parents

From the start of the design phase, we prioritised a balance of fun and functionality, ensuring that there were both captivating visuals for children and a clear, informative user journey for the parents, who are more focused on product quality and durability.

We worked in close collaboration with Roarsome to further build upon their brand guidelines, playing with colour palettes and fonts until we found the perfect balance to convey the spirit of the brand. This then laid the stage for us to build out Roarsome’s user journey in more detail. 

As before, Roarsome’s characters were to have a prominent position on the new site. In fact, we were able to give Roarsome the “shop by Character” navigation they had been looking for, giving each character its own unique collection page. Taking this a step further, we built upon the initial illustrations through animations and sound effects to double down on the playfulness and narrative flow that Roarsome had established.