A digital lick of paint for 1000 Trades
01 Challenge
1000 Trades is an independent bar and kitchen in the heart of our old stomping ground, The Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. The business opened its doors in 2016, and up until 2020 when the global pandemic hit, was often the first choice for regulars and visitors of the JQ.
Fast forward to February 2022 (we don’t think anybody wants to relive 2020), and we wanted to use our website development expertise to give back to local businesses. So, we launched an online competition, Love Thy Website, which gave UK pubs the chance to win a free website built on our web platform, Brew.web.
1000 Trades applied and their submission was short, sweet, and won us over immediately:
“We’re poor, we’re sexy, but we need a digital lick of paint.”
And just like that, we had a winner and the foundation for our next challenge…
1000 Trades did have a website, but it felt like a reflection of the pub they used to be, not the pub they’d become; a pub that battled to stay afloat throughout the pandemic and succeeded – which, as we all know, many sadly didn’t.
This updated website needed to show off all the reasons for regulars and fresh faces to walk through the door, focusing on their pub events, pop-up kitchens, comedy, and live music nights.
02 Approach
We began with a face-to-face meeting with John and Sam, co-owner and manager, respectively, to break the news that they’d won our Love Thy Website competition.
During that meeting, we had an in-depth discussion about where 1000 Trades were as a business versus where they wanted to be. We used this insight – and a few snaps – to brief the wider Brew team on expectations for the project and set a date for an intensive half-day workshop.
By understanding what they wanted to achieve with the new website, we could outline six key objectives for the project:
- Drive and increase footfall
- Increase profits
- Make events more visible and create a more flexible event upload process
- Refresh the online branding
- Integrate ecommerce to create another source of revenue
- Market 1000 Trades to a wider audience e.g., young professionals and corporate clients
Over the following couple of weeks, we planned for the workshop with input from design, content, development, and project management teams. In the process, we created a deck which included:
- Audience personas
- Target audience
- Keywords and phrases
- Competitor analysis
- Brand positioning
- Design elements
- Photography direction
- Website functionality
The purpose of this workshop was to present all the research and recommendations we’d put together based on the initial discussions. Once these details had been collaboratively fine-tuned and finalised, we’d have everything we needed to brief the team and get to work.
With this information, we had all the details we needed to:
- Create the website design, a prototype to show what the website could look like when finished
- Write the website copy with SEO-focused keywords and personas in mind
- Source a photographer for high-quality photos that captured their unique vibe
- Create the website’s new features, functionality, and security
After meeting with John and Sam once more to showcase the website design and prototype (which they loved), we moved on to the final build process, bringing the new 1000 Trades website to life.
The website was built on brew.web, a platform that offers a simple way of building brilliant, bespoke websites with a guarantee of unique designs, fast load times, enhanced performance, improved security, central updates and maintenance – meaning you’ll never need another website again.
Social media is important but a website is your shop window - if it's shoddy, it's a turn-off. The team at Brew are specialists in what they do, and know the hospitality sector inside out. They undertook a deep dive into our business and brand; the result is a website that looks stunning and reflects who we are, and that is easy to update and fine-tuned to drive traffic in an intelligent way.
John Stapleton
03 Outcome
We told you a couple months ago that we would report what became of this project, which we can now present.
Although not all objectives could be quantified, from the 1st March to 3rd July we can say that we have;
- Driven footfall
- With 1,775 clicks on the external booking link, it was the most popular external link amongst users.
- Made events more visible and create a more flexible event upload process
- There were 1,665 page views for the ‘Events’ section making it the 4th most viewed amongst users.
- Integrate ecommerce to create another source of revenue
- With 5 orders from the 1000 Trades Shopify store.
- Market 1000 Trades to a wider audience e.g., young professionals and corporate clients
- 893 users had visited 1000 Trades via from various social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter and Facebook)
- Other interesting stats
- Over the course of four months
- Almost 50 emailing signups over the course of 4 months.
- 7,393 New Users and 904 Returning users.
- 5,402 users came from London and Birmingham.
- Over the course of four months
Ready to start seeing results of your own? Visit brew.web and get into contact with us!
Like what you see?
Does your business need a digital re-brand and high-quality, dynamic website? Get in touch.