Jonathan Ford Studio
From shaping global brands to creating impactful art - the heart of Jonathan’s work is storytellinG.
The Challenge
Jonathan Ford is the Founder and Global Creative Director of Pearlfisher, and now the artist behind works such as “Struck” - his inaugural exhibition.
Jonathan was looking for e-commerce expertise that could help him take his work online whilst streamlining the sales and production of his highly bespoke fine art pieces; minimising his need to be actively involved in the customer process from order, to delivery.
The Outcome
A purpose built Shopify e-commerce store that enabled a prospective customer to easily navigate through Jonathan’s fine art, discover his process, inspect individual pieces through high resolution photographs and descriptions, and easily order custom pieces with over 4000 variables; which would then be made to order, to Jonathan’s specifications, by a hand selected production partner.
Client
Jonathan Ford
Sector
E-commerce & Art
Expertise
Shopify E-commerce Design & Development
UX & UI Design
Photography
Tone of Voice & Copywriting
Production & Manufacture
Business Development & Strategy
Social Media Marketing
To find out more about our work for Jonathan or any of our other projects, get in touch.
To keep everything streamlined we built his store on Shopify. This enabled us to create a website that highlighted his artwork and process, provide detailed descriptions, a simple browsing experience and one page checkout.
Beyond the homepage, collection pages and product pages, we created engaging blog posts, an about page, contact page, comprehensive FAQs and store policy pages.
Finally we built out a comprehensive pricing calculator that allowed Jonathan to input his raw material costs and his time to make; outputting a suggest sales price, margins and profits for each piece.
E-commerce
Production
At the centre of this project was automating the ordering and production process and delivery of the customisable, and highly personal piece, Ash | The Golden Years; using as little of Jonathan’s time as possible.
An individual ring, representing years from 1952 - 2015, can be chosen by the customer and foiled in either Gold, Rose Gold or Silver; across 4 different paper types and 4 framing options. Creating over 4000 variants that can be ordered directly from the product page alone.
Finding a production partner for this proved particularly challenging, but in the end we prevailed, enabling orders to go from receipt to delivery without using up any of Jonathan’s time.
Photography
Critical to the success of an e-commerce store’s ability to sell is really good photography. With e-commerce you need images that show just the product, the details and context.
Whilst we had some brilliant photos of Jonathan’s process, the big challenge here was creating standardised product images for collection pages; all of Jonathan’s work was either already framed, wasn’t available to be photographed, or was too big to put into a contextualised environment.
So, we had to work around reflections, create environments for context (in part collaboratively with the team at Pearlfisher using Midjourney Ai - not shown here) and in some cases photorealistic imagery from print files never made before.
