Photo Affections is a leading online provider of customizable printed photos and cards. In the latter part of 2008, Photo Affections approached White Lion to discuss a project aimed at stimulating online success, as well as customers’ experience when ordering custom photo cards. Many competitors had begun using interactive tools enabling customers to build and preview photo cards prior to ordering, and it was time for Photo Affections to join in the race.
White Lion’s goal was to learn about what competitors were doing, and to engineer and develop a better interactive tool that would earn Photo Affections greater market share in the industry. Through hundreds of hours of research, planning, testing and usability experiments, White Lion was able to develop the Preview Tool you see on the web site today. Not only did this Preview Tool add instant gratification for Photo Affections’ customers, but it also provided a higher level of accuracy in order fulfillment. Unlike the previous arrangement, Photo Affections is now able to see a proof of exactly what customers want. The proofing techniques ensure the product delivered meets or exceeds customers’ expectations. This is what separates Photo Affections from the competition. Photo Affections takes great pride in delivering a quality product and, unlike many competitors, takes additional steps prior to production to inspect and fine-tune the quality of customers’ photos.
In addition to the front-end Preview Tool, White Lion also developed a fully-dynamic back-end management interface through which Photo Affections can manage products. Our innovative system made the process of adding new products, as well as managing existing products, very simple. From product categories to fonts, text areas to image hotspots, Photo Affections is able to manage every aspect of what has grown to be an extensive photo card template library.
After much success with the new Preview Tool, it soon became apparent that Photo Affections needed to further maximize processes and efficiency to keep up with growing numbers of orders and new products. Once again, Photo Affections and White Lion worked together to engineer and develop a new system to directly import product templates and designs from production software applications into the website. This process ultimately replaced the need for the initial back-end management interface, but offered a new level of speed and automation that boosted productivity.
Taking things one step further, White Lion and Photo Affections began brainstorming ideas for how to make the process of getting a customer’s design from an online order to finished product more efficient. Due to Photo Affections’ pride in pre-production quality assurance, and sometimes personally communicating with customers, they were cautious about over-automating the process. Photo Affections strongly believes personal touch and quality assurance adds to a superior product and customers value that fact. Taking this into consideration, White Lion was able to develop a system through which orders get automatically exported from the Web-based system to the local production software environment. This allows Photo Affections to fulfill a higher volume of orders, while still maintaining valuable quality control processes.
As a result of the new additions White Lion has developed, Photo Affections’ sales have increased approximately 30% year-to-date. The Photo Affections team is now able to operate with fewer resources than ever before. Considering the condition of the economy over the past twelve months, a 30% increase in sales was a feat that could only be hoped for originally, but that has become a reality.
It was only through hours of dedication, research, testing and development by both parties that this was possible. White Lion is truly ecstatic with the outcome and we value the relationship we’ve established with Photo Affections. We’re looking forward to even further expansion and development in the near future. Our team has worked hard to position Photo Affections as the industry leader through innovative web design and development. I personally look forward to expanding beyond the Preview Tool and back-end tools, and redesigning the entire site in 2010.
To see the Preview Tool in action, try following this link and clicking on the “Click Here to Begin!” button!
Justin Rankin
Project Manager
White Lion Internet Agency