Based in Stockport, Sewdirect is the UK’s leading retailer of sewing patterns, home to brands including Simplicity, Vogue Patterns, McCall’s, Butterick and more. Sewdirect is part of Simplicity Creative Group, headquartered in New York.

Sewdirect sells sewing patterns, accessories, and sewing tools to crafters in the UK and Europe. The brand also sells VIP member subscriptions to customers, giving exclusive access to new products and member-only discounts.

Sewdirect approached Patter to build a new e-commerce website to support their growth goals.

The Problem

Sewdirect’s previous website was slow and difficult to use and maintain, owing in part to its reliance on many third-party WordPress plugins. These same plugins created a constant threat of potential security issues, or site downtime when plugins were updated.

The site was running on outdated versions of WordPress and WooCommerce, further adding to the risk of potential security issues, whilst slowing down the site for visitors.

Due to these issues, Sewdirect was paying considerable money each month to resolve bug fixes, pulling resources away from being able to materially improve the visitor experience.

The old Sewdirect website was not integrated with any back-office or ERP system, meaning every order needed to be manually downloaded and uploaded for fulfilment. This took up considerable staff time and, in some cases, slowed down orders.

The checkout and payment process of the old Sewdirect website was clunky and looked broken, and only supported transactions in GBP, despite the business serving customers across mainline Europe. These issues compounded to reduce the conversion rate.

The website was not mobile-friendly, didn’t support Apple or Google Pay and had limited content control, plus quickly became overwhelmed by relatively low traffic numbers.

Combined, these issues meant that Sewdirect couldn’t reliably grow their online revenue with their previous website. Patter was instructed to design and develop a new site.

The Solution

Using our Wordpress-as-a-service approach, we designed and built a new WordPress and WooCommerce website for Sewdirect. The site needed to be launched within a tight timeline, in order to meet internal business requirements.

WordPress was the correct choice for this site as Sewdirect is content-driven; the native content features were beneficial to Sewdirect and their editorial team.

The new Sewdirect website was built using the core features of WordPress, plus bespoke development to meet the brand’s exact requirements. The site uses as few plugins as possible, and those used are either in-house Patter plugins, or those built by Woo, Automattic or carefully selected plugins licensed from third parties. No other third-party plugins were used on the site.

By developing new bespoke elements into the native Gutenberg block editor in WordPress, the new site can be populated and updated by Sewdirect team members with no additional cost or requirement from Patter. This helps to speed up changes and keeps running costs far lower than with the previous website.

Sewdirect offers a subscription product to customers. We created a new signup process for this subscription, doubling the uptake in the process. We moved all new subscribers from Direct Debit to card payment. This new process now manages thousands of regular payments from subscribed members.

As part of the new website built, we moved Sewdirect from Sage Pay to WooPayments. This brought several benefits, including allowing customers to browse the site and check out in their native currency, with payments being deposited with Sewdirect in GBP. This improved the customer experience and removed forex fees for the customer and reduced them for the business.

During the planning stages of the project, we worked with Sewdirect to guide them towards making technology decisions that aligned with the core of WordPress and WooCommerce. This helped them make the most of the technologies and their abilities.

The Outcome

We designed, developed, tested, and launched the new Sewdirect website in time to meet the important internal deadline, creating a website that worked better for customers, improved the conversion rate and subscription-uptake rate, and cost no more than the old and broken website was costing in hosting and bug fixes.

With a streamlined internal process for fulfilment and a new ERP integration, the new website has reduced internal staff costs and sped up the order management process.

The new site gives Sewdirect better IOSS tax reporting for sales across Europe.

Since launch, Sewdirect has seen a 26% increase in revenue through the new website, and has doubled year-on-year recurring subscription revenue. All whilst reducing operating costs.