Redcurrent is a Hawke’s Bay success story. A retail chain running from Auckland to Dunedin, Redcurrent’s first shop opened in Havelock North in 1999. The 10 Redcurrent shops around New Zealand are very successful and the brand has grow rapidly to become well-known and loved.

Having lots of shops is great, but these days, everybody expects to be able to buy online, especially when it comes to buying gifts for friends and family who live far away. So Rebecca and the team at Redcurrent made the momentous decision to offer the Redcurrent experience online.

The challenge for us at Mogul was to create an online store that was clear and easy to use and at the same time kept the essential “Redcurrent-ness” of the brand and the physical shops.

We think we’ve succeeded.

We built the site on an open-source e-commerce platform called Magento which is well-proven and popular and allows you to add lots of extensions. For example, gift wrapping is very important for Redcurrent customers because a lot of their business comes from gifts for friends and family. So that’s taken care of. You can even choose different wrapping for men and women.

To make it as easy as possible for Redcurrent’s backroom staff, we’ve also integrated the site with Redcurrent’s POS system and we’re using a new NZ software product called Starship for Fastway courier integration (Starship’s the product of another Hawke’s Bay success story, software architect and entrepreneur George Plummer).

Apart from a beautiful, easy-to-use website, the key to successful online retail is marketing the store proactively to Redcurrent’s customers, so a long term plan is critical to its success. You can read a case study here about what we’ve done to promote Redcurrent in the lead up to the launch of the store. The results are pretty impressive.

And to keep Redcurrent’s content marketing on the boil, we’ve added a WordPress blog. This is going to be populated with style tips, news, and all the stories that keep Redcurrent’s visitors in the know and engaged with the brand.

So the focus right now is on getting the word out to all of Redcurrent’s loyal customers via email marketing and content marketing via social media, and then getting to work on search engine optimisation, paid spots and PR.

So visit the Redcurrent site, have a look around, buy some stuff, tell your friends, tweet about it, Facebook it, whatever you do!