Est1897 is the retail brand of H&T Group, set up to stock pre-owned watches from luxury brands including Rolex, Breitling, Cartier, and Tag-Heuer.
As the name suggests, they established back in 1897 and have been growing ever since.
H&T is one of the oldest and largest pawnbrokers and has over 250 stores nationwide, this number of stores presents a unique challenge to their retail brand Est1897.
Each H&T store has an incredible range of jewellery and watches from high end brands, which includes the likes of Rolex and Cartier. H&T wanted each and every customer across the UK, to have visibility and most importantly access to their phenomenal range.
The business also wanted to keep the items in their stores providing their customers with a personable experience.
H&T are growing each year, so required a system that could not only grow with them but was capable of managing the huge inventory list. In addition to the scale of the system, they also have a vast range of skill sets utilising the system. This meant that it had to be intuitive to update stock ranges for their staff as well as looking elegant for their customers.
H&T selected Cold Banana due to our experience in building robust and secure web platforms capable of managing a huge demand.
We selected Umbraco as the CMS of choice due to its flexibility to display an engaging, reactive, fast and robust website.
It has an incredible ability to manage a large number of 'member' profiles meaning that H&T can easily set each staff member specific permission levels for adding stock to the site. H&T can then ensure the portal is used to update content regularly, be intuitive yet still easy-to-use.
To provide the best possible solution we paired Umbraco with Ucommerce an enterprise .NET eCommerce solution designed specifically to integrate seamlessly with the Umbraco CMS. Simplifying the process for employees to upload items and still offering the flexibility, speed and security they needed for their website.
H&T launched this solution as its own branded EST1897, the site is capable of managing over 6000 products. It offers Click and Collect functionality and also integrates with Sagepay and Close Brothers Finance, offering their customers a seamless experience for the whole duration of their customer journey.
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