EST
Seamless migration and custom refresh for a legacy toy brand
Uniting work & play with Schleich
German toy brand Schleich is a world-renowned name in childrens’ figurines, recognized for their strong branding and wide product offering. They are on a mission to reflect the natural curiosity of kids, with high quality, detailed figurines of all sizes and shapes. Scheich came to Half Helix to re-platform their North American sites to Shopify and simultaneously refresh their approach to D2C on the most popular platform for the region. They were looking to increase profitability, improve third party integrations, and increase conversion. Their Magento sites were costly to operate and required dedicated development and maintenance work, resulting in a slowed pace for bug fixes and lengthy time-to-market for new features and services. The migration of their Canadian and American e-commerce sites involved a close collaboration with the Schleich team during scoping and discovery, diving deeply to understand their business, creating diagrams of their order flow, and breaking down their existing sites in a granular way, given the multi-faceted nature of the brand’s worldwide presence. The migration allows the Schleich team to benefit from Shopify’s rapid deployment and AI capabilities while unlocking access to the Shopify ecosystem’s apps and seamless integrations. The Half Helix team rebuilt their backend flow within Shopify in a mere few days, a project that was forecasted to last at least four months on the Magento platform. The final result is two new Shopify sites built with theme flexibility, customized for their products and processes. The Half Helix team is now working on the next phase of the project, developing stronger personalization tools through machine learning.
Disciplines
- Magento Migration
- Shopify Development
- Klaviyo Integration
- Yotpo Integration
Location
Visit Live Site
01
Migrating to Shopify with a flexible theme for expansion
The Half Helix team took the same approach as the Laura Mercier and Timex projects, creating a universal theme for all expansion stores. This has become a go-to move for the Half Helix team when tackling projects for global brands with a vast, detailed product range. The approach allows the Schleich team to toggle features on and off for their Canadian and American sites, supports multi-language, and easily allows them to roll into new markets with different currencies.
02
Introducing a one-of-a-kind category system through a customized theme
Scheich’s products are meticulously organized into different categories, allowing shoppers to browse for toys not only within product categories but also by themes such as ‘Farm World’. Migrating this deep categorization to Shopify required the Half Helix team to take a unique approach with Shopify tags, adding custom theme features to allow customers to filter product. A naming convention was implemented to achieve this, with specific tags used to identity product types so that customers can narrow down product that meets a specific criteria.
03
Adding compliance measures in across integrations
Custom integrations were developed for Schleich’s loyalty program on Yotpo and their newsletter program on Klaviyo. The Half Helix team worked hard to ensure the Scheich sites’ compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy measures. Creating an account with the brand and signing up for its loyalty program needed to be age-gated at 18+, so the team developed a custom feature allowing customers to confirm their age.
04
Migrating CSV product content for simplified mass-updates
The brand’s vast directory of product features and functionality are managed by their team in a library of CSV files. The Half Helix team created a custom solution so that they could continue to do mass updates on their content, by adapting the new sites’ Shopify metafields to replicate the functionality of this library. The team can now download a CSV of their product content, update relevant data points, and reupload to Shopify for the system to automatically update the relevant products, making it much easier for the team to self-perform mass updates for product descriptions or even pricing in the event of sales.
