Colour crafty website for contemporary craft brand, Stitching Me Softly
" Studio Cotton took the time to listen to what I needed from a website and then made suggestions of things they knew I would find useful. I felt that my opinions and ideas were both valued and enhanced by Aime and her team." Stitching Me Softly is a Bristol-based craft brand specialising in modern crafting kits and crochet for all ages. For total transparency, it’s also a business run by one of my very best friends and favourite people on the planet, Emma Bassey, whom I love more than I love prawn cocktail crisps – and I really love prawn cocktail crisps. If you’re reading this expecting a totes unbiased report of a recent website project, then you’re in the wrong place. I’m about to gush about how great my friend is, with a smattering of website goodness. Stitching Me Softly was established in 2016, where it had quickly transformed from a passion project into a growing modern craft business. Emma had been successfully selling her kits and crochet through Etsy, but needed her first professional website to help take Stitching Me Softly to the next level. Emma had quickly cemented herself as a leading craft designer, with features in local and national magazines including Mollie Makes, Love Crochet, Caboodle and Circus Journal. This, plus a booking for 2019’s The Handmade Festival with Kirstie Allsopp, meant we had a tight deadline to create a colourful, professional and modern ecommerce website that reflected Emma’s incredible brand. Our main challenges for this project were creating a banging site with a tight deadline, and handling products with literally hundreds of variations. Emma is a self-confessed techno-avoider – but she’s also an amazingly fast learner and so I had no concerns about being able to adopt a new content management system. Emma is also a total babe, but that’s not related to the website. Meeting our deadline for The Handmade Festival with Kirsty Alsopp meant we also had plenty of time for the website to index with Google for the Christmas shopping frenzy. This nicely complemented Emma’s market and Etsy sales, and ensured a super smooth start to this new stage of Stitching Me Softly. In the 6 weeks preceding the Stitching Me Softly Christmas order cut off, the site also saw an INCREDIBLE 6.98% conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who place orders), well above the healthy range of 2-2.5%. Post-Christmas the site is averaging a lovely 3% which is amazing for a business that has not previously had a website, and a massive testament to Emma’s phenomenal products, brand, and gosh dang hard work. "I’m over the moon with my new website, it fulfills the brief I set out and it’s functionality has surpassed my expectations. The styling is perfectly matched to my branding and it’s very easy to manage. It’s a great platform for selling my products, and the customer conversion rate has been excellent."
