Muddy Faces

Overview

Muddy Faces are a leading supplier of Forest Schools and challenging outdoor play equipment for children. They sell a huge range of equipment and resources to schools and educational centres across the country.

We were asked to update Muddy Faces' brand identity with a new logo and build a new ecommerce website, to form something that reflected the professionalism and the quality of their products.

The Brief

The brief that we received from Muddy Faces was simple - Redesign the logo to be more representative of the company, and redesign the website to be more user friendly and professional, whilst not alienating the current customer base.

The previous Muddy Faces website was built on an OS Commerce system and a lot of time and effort had been put in to building the database. They didn't want all that effort to go to waste, so they asked us if we could also build the new website around this CMS, albeit a newer version. OS Commerce is not something that we had previous experience with, but we jumped at the opportunity to learn something new and build a website that fitted perfectly inline with the clients needs.

What We Delivered

Our Strategy

After developing the logo in line with their already established brand colours, the first thing that we did was assess the default OS Commerce platform on the old website and conduct plenty of research into how to customise the basic functionality. It was soon quite apparent that the user experience could be a lot better and they could potentially gain much higher sales by tweaking a few things. We also looked at a lot of other shopping systems in order to settle on the exact approach that we
should take.

During the design process we were very aware of the ethics and attitude of Muddy Faces; fun, outgoing, wild - but we also had to consider the users (mainly teachers) who would be purchasing from the website. We wanted to make the site stand out against their competitors and other online retailers in general (who mainly have very standard looking websites). We settled on a design which oozed fun and the outdoors, but which was still very navigable and held the products and the forefront of the page.