There were no trade shows,” Vishnu says. “That’s when we realized that people, even our existing customers, were turning to the web a lot more. We needed to have a professional, customer-facing website that could accurately represent our brand.
Before their website redesign and ecommerce capabilities, Hale Cosmeceuticals took orders on the phone—a method that could make for a more personalized experience but could also lead to a loss of sales. “If we’re not available to pick up the phone after hours, we are potentially losing out on sales,” Vishnu adds. “We wanted to be able to provide wholesalers an ecommerce platform so that after they finish the day with their clients, they can log on and make their purchases—even if it’s on a weekend or a holiday. We knew we needed to adapt to the times.”
Vishnu tasked HubBase with bringing Hale Cosmeceuticals’ website from the past to the present-day—first through a website redesign and later by enabling ecommerce through Shopify. In just a few short months since launching its online store, the company has already seen the benefits of having a powerful online presence.
“We only went live with ecommerce about four months ago,” Vishnu says. “All our customers are used to ordering by phone and email, so we never thought we’d see 100% of orders going through our website, but in that short amount of time, we have seen probably close to 40–50% of people putting in orders online.”
HubBase has given Hale Cosmeceuticals another way to connect with their existing and prospective customers, as well as providing the support they needed as the business entered a new chapter.
A Vision Turned Reality
When Vishnu saw the initial designs for the homepage, he excitedly showed the rest of his team. “I was like, ‘Wow. We’re actually going to have a professional website,’’’ Vishnu says. “I printed out the screenshot!”
On top of a sleek website,Vishnu wanted the new version of the website to have a robust product filtering capability.
“There’s so much they consider: ingredients, skin type, the type of product consistency, and more,” he says. “We have 45–50 products and six or seven different categories that you can filter by, and to do that in HubSpot CMS was a little bit of a challenge. We went back and forth on the best way to do this. We kept thinking about how it would look for the customer; they had to be able to not just choose one filter but filter across many different categories so that they could find the products they needed easily.”
This was an area where Vishnu and his team had a very clear vision and knew they could not compromise, and HubBase helped make it a reality.
Regular and Timely Communication
Redesigning a website requires regular communication so that developers can build exactly what the client wants. For Vishnu, HubBase’s communication style—a mix of Slack and Trello.com, proven real-time communication and task management platforms—stood out.
“We had regular meetings set up to communicate updates,” he says. “We had very specific things we needed to get done, so being able to speak to them on a regular basis helped all of us stay on the same page.”
Vishnu also appreciated HubBase’s ability to get back to him when unexpected needs arose. “Issues come up. Bugs happen,” he says. “They’re able to fix them by taking the time to understand the problems. We would send them a message, and they would quickly get someone on it to look at it and figure it out. That provided peace of mind. They’re very good about getting back to us—even if it’s a question about a project completed six months ago.”
An Easy-to-Manage Website
One big requirement for Vishnu was the ability to update the Hale Cosmeceuticals website with ease when necessary. “We wanted to build in a way where we could make minor updates,” he says. “We can update monthly specials ourselves. We can add new products ourselves. We wanted to be able to update these minor things ourselves, and HubBase built it in a way that we could handle the small maintenance things.”
HubSpot CMS and Shopify provide powerful content management solutions. The trick is that the developer builds as per the best practices of these platforms to ensure the end product is easier to manage and flexible. HubBase has years of experience working with both HubSpot and Shopify, so they used their knowledge of best practices to build a great website and ecommerce store.
