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Step into my office: Biglight on image significance and ecommerce

By Jessica Davis | Consultant Journalist

The Future Factory

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The Drum Network article

This content is produced by The Drum Network, a paid-for membership club for CEOs and their agencies who want to share their expertise and grow their business.

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October 20, 2016 | 7 min read

'Step into my office,' a new series of interviews powered by The Future Factory and The Drum Network, focuses on the challenges and the opportunities facing agencies this year. We will be taking a sneak peek into the lives of agencies, how they work, what motivates them and what their thoughts are on the current state of the industry. Steve Borges, co-founder of Biglight, discusses the company’s choices, successes and how small decisions drive the company forward.

Steve Borges

Steve Borges

What does the agency do?

We’re a customer experience agency. We harness the power of UX, creative, content, testing and personalisation to help great brands create remarkable customer experiences. We like the idea that we’re helping people get closer to the brands they love.

How long have you been around and why did you start the agency?

We’re celebrating our 10th anniversary this year; we started the agency back in 2006 to help brands create their very first ecommerce channels and our first two customers were Burberry and New Look, so we’ve been working on established, high profile brands from the beginning.

What makes you different from your competitors?

It’s our 100 per cent focus on the customer experience and our combination of creative and optimisation capabilities – we come from a retail background, which means we thoroughly understand how to help brands create better experiences and drive sales across all retail channels. We're also experienced in helping brands use MVT tools to innovate through experimentation.

What have you found to be the biggest challenge this year?

I would say the biggest challenge over the last year or so has been getting the right talent on board as the business grows. We look for remarkable people, so the process isn’t always fast or easy. However, the right people can transform your business, and that of your customers – it’s vital that the recruitment strategy is spot on.

Biglight

What do you see as the biggest opportunities over the next year?

Digital transformation of retail is huge for us. Helping retail brands understand more about their users and the end-to-end customer journey (offline and online), pinpointing areas of customer pain and frustration and developing digital services to make the process frictionless and enjoyable for customers, whether this is online or in-store. That’s where it’s at.

We’re seeing more and more brands embracing the potential of experimentation through MVT testing to enhance performance while improving the customer experience; this is as applicable to creative execution as it is for UX, so we’re ideally placed to support this. We’re also partners with all the leading MVT and personalisation tools out there.

What do you think will be the biggest challenges facing ecommerce over the next few years?

As the shift to mobile continues unabated, how retailers create more engaging mobile commerce experiences (involving personalisation and better use of content), and how they can continuously improve conversion on mobile, is going to become a greater challenge.

We know that creativity plays a huge role in increasing purchase motivation, yet retailers tend to complete a big-bang redesign every few years. The challenge moving forwards will be to continuously evolve the look and feel of ecommerce sites to drive improvements in performance. Many retailers haven’t yet recognised the extent to which their online and offline channels support each other. The challenge will be to understand how customers actually use these channels and create great experiences across them that meet user needs. User testing, beautiful creative, testing and experimentation will all play a big role in overcoming these challenges.

Where are you based and why this location?

We are in a great building in Kentish Town, North-West London. It has a dark history – it was once the workshop of Rowland Ward, one of the most famous taxidermists in the world. It’s a great “up and coming” location with fantastic facilities that helps us to attract talent from across London.

How important is location for you?

It’s extremely important. To attract the very best talent, we need to be accessible to all and must ensure that our customers and partners find it easy, pleasant and convenient to come and see us.

Do you feel the office needs to be quirky and irreverent or simply functional?

We like a balance and think that’s the best approach. Our building has a unique history, wonderful high ceilings, exposed brickwork and old industrial beams. We’ve done our very best to make something interesting out of all these elements, whilst providing a modern and comfortable working environment for our people.

Biglight
Biglight

Because we often welcome members of the public who come in to help us with usability testing and focus groups, we need to ensure they are safe and relaxed and, of course, we meet our customers here, so we need it to be professional too.

I’d say quirky but professional is what an office should be like. It should make an impact though; if people don’t say, “wow” when they come in, we’re disappointed. We’re aiming for remarkable in everything we do.

Who are your current clients?

We’ve got a great range of customers including Asda, Aurum, Furniture Village, Mothercare and Timberland. We’ve worked hard to ensure that we’re the first choice for brands who want to be creative in representing their brands digitally and improve their customer experience to deliver greater customer value.

What are the three projects you are most proud of this year?

  • George/Asda - Creating a new content hub for George/Asda and helping them present relevant content within the customer journey to deepen engagement and drive sales.
  • Timberland - Redesigning the Timberland sites in the US and across Europe – a great project working with a fantastic team that really stretched our creative, UX and optimisation capabilities
  • Our Lab - Refurbishing our offices to create new reception facilities, a café bar and a brand new, state-of-the art UX Innovation Lab.

What are your most recent achievements/wins?

We’ve attracted some extremely talented people in the last 12 months, who really believe in what we’re focused on achieving. We’re even finding that contractors who come and work here want to join as permanent staff, which we’re very proud of.

We’ve also won many great customers recently, including Eurostar, Hobbs and FitFlop, all of whom have bought into our concept of combining creative and optimisation to deliver improved customer value, demonstrating that we have a relevant and appealing offering.

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Content by The Drum Network member:

The Future Factory

With a mix of lead generation, board level consultancy and coaching, we help to make the future more predictable for agency Owners, Founder and Directors. www.thefuturefactory.co.uk

Since 2011, we have helped to shape the future of more than 300 agencies, contributing to new business wins in excess of £100m.

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