Hullabalook x Kingfisher shortlisted for Retail Week’s Customer Experience Award

For the second year running, we’ve been shortlisted for a Retail Week award!

This time, our Paint Mixing Experience, live on diy.com, has been recognised as an innovative tool, positively impacting the online customer experience. 

So, what is the Paint Mixing Experience, and why is it so cool?

The Challenge: Making Paint Shoppable Online

B&Q's parent company, Kingfisher were looking for a way to sell their Valspar mixed paint offering online. If you add together all of the Valspar paint shades, finishes and sizes, you get over 100,000 product options. The sheer complexity of data meant that Kingfisher couldn’t see a feasible way to facilitate this shopping journey online. 

If Kingfisher applied a traditional paint buying navigation system to these products, it would take their shoppers hours – if not days – to discover and select the paint they want to purchase. This is exactly why mixed paint was only available to purchase in-store, until now. 

Shop Thousands of Paint Shades Online

Kingfisher enlisted Hullabalook's help and the Paint Mixing Experience was born. Thanks to our technology, diy.com shoppers can now explore thousands of mixed paint shades online, and purchase their chosen shade in minimal clicks.

Hullabalook believes product listing pages (PLPs) – also known as 'category pages' – are unnecessarily constrained by traditional structures. So instead of approaching this in a traditional way, we began by considering what customers care about most when buying paint. The answer? Colour, of course. 

Once we agreed this, we aimed to deploy a PLP tailored to this need.

Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, instead of purely filtering, our colour grid instantly re-ranks the entire catalogue and surfaces the best matching paint colours right at the top, negating the need for endless scrolling. Here’s how it works in three simple steps:

• With over 40 paint shades shown in a single viewport, customers can rapidly browse and compare.
• Hullabalook’s technology programmatically renders any chosen paint shade onto the walls of a photorealistic image in the experience to aid visualisation.
• Shoppers can quickly choose and buy paint in their desired shade, finish and quantity in just a few clicks.

A New Online Shopping Experience

The results have been amazing. We have enabled a completely new online shopping experience and revenue stream for Kingfisher which, in itself, is an incredible achievement. We’ve also significantly increased the number of paint shades that surface on shoppers' device vs traditional PLPs, which means that customers convert at a much higher rate.

Fingers Crossed for the Paint Mixing Experience!

To be recognised by such a prestigious award is a big moment for both the Kingfisher and Hullabalook team. We believe that the Paint Mixing Experience is a truly revolutionary tool which will aid millions of customers in their paint buying journeys.

Good luck to all the other Retail Week award nominees!

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