Hershey Orders
Redesigning the Hershey Company’s B2B ordering experience for foodservice, c-store, grocery and retail buyers.
01 Overview
The ‘online Hershey Order Connection’ was suffering from crippling adoption due to numerous pain points and degraded brand perception.
The Hershey Company came to my team to redesign their B2B experience. What we designed was net new online ordering product and brand identity — as well as strategic guidance in socialization, adoption, and implementation.
The Opportunity
The Hershey Company’s B2B customer roles and job functions ladder up to distinct industry + buyer segments — each of which service unique sales channels, end-consumer audiences, and product applications.
We transformed the buying experience to meet these changing customer needs throughout their career.
The end result being Hershey Orders.
02 Research & Analysis
For this project our research efforts were focused on both user experience and brand perception.
Overseeing both research tracks, I fostered synergetic cross-collaboration to further identify existing opportunities and strategic solutions.
Brand Exploration
We established two design directions for the product’s net new Brand — utilizing benchmarking, style tiles, and exploratory copywriting to determine a path forward.
03 Solution & Design
Once we aligned on core functionality needed and a brand direction, we moved into design solution and brand strategy efforts.
This included designing new information architecture & wireframes, high-fidelity prototypes, and a new atomic design system Hershey Orders.
Brand Discovery
It was important to showcase the Hershey Company’s portfolio of brands throughout the experience as both a means for wayfinding and for building credibility among customers.
We solved for this with integrated moments (of goodness) throughout the primary navigation, homepage, and various CMS components throughout the design suite.
Weight Tracker
Hershey Orders utilizes a minimum weight threshold that must be met by customers to place any orders.
We solved for this business requirement by designing features to decrease customer friction — such as standardized product imagery, Material ID, and quantity weight throughout.
We also introduced a persistent Weight Tracker across the experience for added visibility and utility.
Pricing & Availability
Throughout our research, we discovered that the data call to inform accurate pricing and product availability was not happening until after the user enters into checkout. This was a major point of frustration that we pushed hard to solve for.
Our team collaborated closely with Hershey’s to arrive at an optimized, comprehensive solution that balanced customer needs and technical capabilities to show accurate pricing on both the PDP and Cart.
Enhanced Quick Order
Our research showed us that Quick Order was the most utilized feature by existing legacy customers. Knowing this, we designed relation-based logic to recommend products based within the new Quick Order experience, based on captured data from user inputs and purchasing patterns.
04 Brand Activation
In addition to a net new digital product and brand identity, my team and I also developed Activation Strategy to support the rollout of Hershey Orders.
As Design Director, I oversaw a collaborative approach between our Brand Strategist, Brand Designer, and Content Strategist to establish a cohesive Identity System and cultivate a distinguishable Voice & Tone for the Brand.
Two key deliverables were produced to best equip the Hershey Orders Team for rollout: 1) B2B Brand Guidelines, and 2) a Go-to-Market Strategy Guide.
05 Outcomes
Hershey’s is currently working to develop and rollout Hershey Orders.
The design and development of Hershey Orders was scoped by Hershey’s as a two-year project, with research, design, & strategy taking place year one and implementation taking place the following year for budgetary reasons.