Urban Decay seeks immersive experience for its online visitors

Cosmetics brand Urban Decay is launching a new content-driven website to provide customers with a more interactive experience than is possible on a commerce site alone. The new site, powered by e-Spirit FirstSpirit content management system, will complement Urban Decay’s e-commerce site based on the Demandware e-commerce platform.

John Perasco, assistant VP of digital at Urban Decay, says, “We have the commerce side and that’s going strong. Now we’re building out the content side and making a visually relevant, beautiful and interesting Urban Decay-branded portion of our site ... People come to urbandecay.com looking for that brand voice, what we have to say, what’s new, what’s trending. They are looking for all kinds of content whether it’s editorial content, videos, product information or other users’ content.”

In addition to the challenge of maintaining rich content, Urban Decay is the midst of global expansion and needs to keep its brand consistent in every country. It also wants to be consistent across its Demandware site and the content side. After considering various options, Urban Decay chose First Spirit because of its integration with Demandware, ease of use for content creators and global content management functionality, according to e-Spirit.

Perasco says, “The design of the UD All Access site is pretty cool. It offers a much more immersive experience and lets people just lose track of time and explore without feeling like they are being screamed at to buy, buy, buy. We have lots of vocal interaction on Instagram and Facebook, which is great, but it’s happening off site. We’re trying to bring some of that back to our site so we can consolidate and curate some of the excitement.”

The UD All Access site is scheduled to go live in later this fall and will be accessible as a menu item on the current e-commerce site.

(Image courtesy of ShutterStock.com)