Stephanides & Son Luxury Goods

Where the elite of luxury goods is portrayed through a lavish, high-end website Fashions change but style is timeless. A. Stephanides & Son Luxury Goods has been the name in luxury style in Cyprus since 1960. They have been bringing to their clients the finest work from the world’s most renowned watchmakers and jewellery designers. However, their old website did not portray nor communicate this, and they needed to redesign & redevelop it. So, A. Stephanides entrusted BLEND to redesign and redevelop their website to better position who they are. They required a site that would exude their leading position in the market and better showcase the luxury brands they represent. Of course, always in line with the stringent guidelines these leading brands have to abide with.

Our creative proposal was a look & feel that highlights the Gold from their branding by using it along with gradient effects against a dark look and tinted / black & white photography. Our design direction aimed to deliver a luxury feel, befitting leading brands like Rolex, Bulgari, Gucci, Boucheron, Casato and generally the elite brands represented by the A. Stephanides & Son group. During the Creative exploration phase, we put together an animated demo to demonstrate our proposed concept, with the initial designs. So we presented the look & feel concept alongside the style-guide. Via the demo the client could understand the animated experience we were after to achieve. This encapsulated an elegant luxurious experience with subtle animations, floating elements against parallax effects. The stylish text animations, as well as particle and wavy effects enhanced the overall attention to detail of the website. Overall the layouts are kept consistent, clean and simple to deliver the same experience on mobile and any other devise. This was deliberate to ensure each brand page stands out clearly with relevant text and imagery. Most importantly, we did not compromise the elegant user experience irrespective of the device you enter their website. At BLEND it is our philosophy and approach that the design should follow the content in tandem with what the client needs to say. We therefore convinced A. Stephanides & Son that they should hire professional copywriters, with whom we worked hand-in-hand to deliver an all-rounded website. Here, the design and words compliment each other to create a seamless user experience conveying the right image for this leading company. We fully customised Wordpress to deliver a clear CMS where the client can amend, change or add content on the entire website without affecting the design in any way whatsoever. In fact, our web developers structured the back end so well that the client was able to jump right in and start uploading content with no prior training. From a development perspective, the biggest challenge encountered on this project related to the subtle animations; and how each page loads in relation to these subtle details that enriches the overall user experience. Additionally, how we applied the parallax scrolling which was developed in such a manner to give depth to each page template. Irrespective of the challenges, our capable design and development team, worked closely together until we achieved a pixel-perfect result.