Revamping the corporate website of a fashion company

With approximately 3,000 retail stores in 32 countries, and products sold in 70 countries across Europe, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and the Middle East, BESTSELLER is a big player in the global fashion industry. However, the company’s corporate website didn’t properly reflect this position. It was difficult to navigate and not visually up to date. Additionally, it didn’t meet the brand’s requirements in terms of site structure and storytelling.

BESTSELLER approached DEPT® to have us revamp their corporate website. The new digital home had to reflect a modern Scandinavian company. It was our task to 1) create an immersive experience that would encompass each of BESTSELLER’s 20+ distinct brands, 2) highlight their focus on transparency and sustainability, 3) guarantee a better experience for mobile users and 4) craft a compelling career section to attract talent.

While BESTSELLER was looking for a fresh take on their identity, it was also important to the brand that core elements such as the colours, fonts and logo wouldn’t be changed.

We started the project by reevaluating BESTSELLER’s strategy to reach their desired target audiences and reprioritising the focus points for the website. By working closely with BESTSELLER’s Talent Acquisition, Corporate Identity, and Communications teams, we ensured that all stakeholders had their say in the new solution.

The main part of the project was the complete redesign and restructure of www.bestseller.com from scratch on the Umbraco CMS. During workshops with stakeholders and their brand team, we refined and narrowed down the direction we wanted to take for the website. We called the look ‘corporate cool’ and used that as a theme we could return to at any point in the process – always making sure we would balance a fashion-forward brand with the corporate goals.

To offer visitors a visual overview of BESTSELLER’s brand portfolio, we built an immersive and unique Brand Selector, through which they can also access a microsite for each brand. Apart from adding a dedicated ‘Sustainability’ section to highlight the company’s focus on transparency, we also reworked the ‘Careers’ section and integrated the company’s job database and recruitment software SuccessFactors, as well as their ServiceNow instance into the new corporate website. Now, BESTSELLER’s editors can show relevant job openings on specific pages and at the same time exclude non-relevant jobs. For example, on the Jack & Jones brand page, only Jack & Jones jobs appear.

Furthermore, thanks to the editor-friendly CMS and a component tool box we delivered, various BESTSELLER teams are enabled to build pages that can be filled with compelling brand storytelling to guarantee an immersive and ‘universe-like’ experience for the visitors.

BESTSELLER’s revamped corporate website is a highly flexible and customisable digital home for the company, that serves a multitude of functions. It now not only showcases the fashion group’s brands and sustainability efforts, but is also a one-stop platform for various stakeholders – from applicants to customers to employees.