Pampered Chef Site Redesign

The Work

• Time-and-Materials project structure

• Speedy timeline (initial goal was to launch in time for holiday shopping season), project kicked off in earnest in June

• Embedded client team

  • Intent to hand off the entire system to PC to own and ramp down Hero Digital efforts toward the end

  • Dev and Creative teams work as one instead of having separate internal/external meetings

The Pampered Chef MLM business model is based on the Tupperware parties of the 70’s. Unlike most eCommerce brands, the vast majority of their business and traffic come from users being directed to the site while they are attending Pampered Chef parties hosted by their friends or family. The following is a summary of how the 3 key parties work together at Pampered Chef: the consultants, the hosts, and the guests.

Consultants

• Selling Pampered Chef products is their side business - or sometimes their entire business

• Multiple levels and ranks, close relationship to the company

• They handle selling information, product and cooking demos, marketing outreach, and a team of hosts

Hosts

• The linchpin of the system - even though hosting is a temporary status

• Significant savings and rewards on products

• They gather friends and families at a PC party and provide a link from which to shop - the more their guests shop, the more rewards they and their consultant receive

Guests

• The attendees of the hosted parties who are prompted to shop

• Often have the goal of supporting their friend (the host) in mind

• Require guidance on which products to choose and their benefits

Pampered Chef’s target audiences would be ones that most benefit from guidance in the kitchen - the busy parents who need easy and scalable meal solutions, the individuals who want to host grand dinner parties, the ones who find cooking valuable but struggle to get started.

The legacy site aims to highlight mealtime solutions on the homepage but this is the only area where they appear on the site.

• No tagging based on these attributes

• Not a facet that could be searched on or filtered by

• Relies on a very small curated set of products

The site also includes recipes in addition to products, but it is currently difficult to see the relationship between them, or understand how they might fit into your lifestyle.

Pampered Chef also offers live events regularly every Tuesday - an area ripe for inspiration and guidance - but fails to advertise their events or make them feel engaging.

All in all, the legacy site fails to draw clear connections between their offerings and fails to educate the user on all the ways the brand can support them in their cooking journey - thereby failing to engage them and draw more of their business.

The team iterated on 2 distinct design directions at the beginning of the project to put before the Pampered Chef executives. This would be the first significant visual restyling done in years, and needed to be sustainable as well as adaptable for different shopping seasons.

Competitive/Comparative inspiration from: Ulta, Target, Anthropologie, Crate & Barrel, IKEA, etc.

Fresh Start focused on simplifying the experience with a clean, minimal base (with some fun accents). It leveraged warmer tones and was more straightforward.

Mix and Mingle took a more playful and catalog-like approach, leveraging more patterns, textures, and embellishments. The attitude was intended to be bolder, more celebratory, and more instpirational.

Ultimately, we aligned on the Mix and Mingle approach for its warmth and inviting tone, which also received positive feedback during quick testing with a mix of consultants and guest shoppers from the past 9 months! (Done by Pampered Chef team with direct access to users)

• Preferred design by all user groups

• Graphics and backgrounds described as modern, fun, eye-catching

• Colors draw attention to actions

• Excited by recipe and gift ideas, going beyond products, aligns with inspiration principle

• Room for photo optimization (current site photography perceived very well)

Wireframing and visual design overlapped in tight 2-week batches with a small team that were all split across multiple projects - which meant active communication was highly important.

UX developed components to support each flow based on the following templates, using the existing site and close collaboration with the client to draw out requirements as we went.

• Offers

• Homepage

• PDP

• PLP

• Search Results

Each component and template was marked with annotations in the wireframing phase, which was particularly critical for requirements and content modeling in the new CMS with our aggressive timeline.

Key Balances During Wireframing

• Upselling to host/consultant status without asking too much or overwhelming the user

• Framing connected hosts and consultants accurately in the context of value for the user

• Featuring deals and collections without coming across as a discount site

• Creating more storytelling and catalog-like opportunities to bring a sense of warmth and showcase what PC has to offer - while making sure pages are not overwhelming for a majority-mobile audience

• Accounting for a wide array of variations, especially in PDP’s, while maintaining consistency where possible

The Result

As of August 2024, we are still in the weeds of design batches.

The client has decided to push out the release dates until after the holiday season, for fear of a poor reaction in their busiest season. The hope is that we will be able to include more testing with both consultants and regular users as we go, given the timeline extension.

Additional items earmarked for the future:

• Baseline IA and navigation testing

• Integration with other third party platforms used by consultants and hosts

• Personalization, improved wishlist/registry experience - hopefully leading to more reasons to create accounts

• Consultant-curated content

• Dynamic experiences around the idea of solving mealtime challenges