ESR Autobody

ESR Autobody

A luxury evolution for the next gen of autobody

A luxury evolution for the next gen of autobody

Challenge

While ESR's 2012 brand identity had served its purpose, it no longer reflected the company’s ambition, or the sleek, modern architecture of its new Alexandria flagship. The brand lacked the depth and dimension needed to appeal to a lifestyle and culture-driven audience, a key step in securing new luxury partnerships with brands like Bentley, McLaren, and Rolls Royce.

ESR’s website also required a total overhaul to meet ambitious business goals. It needed to be more than just a brochure, aiming to increase new clientele by 40% in 24 months, act as a transparent window into their high-quality facilities, and drive preference amongst new drivers - all while highlighting what truly sets them apart from competitors who have copied their brand over the years. We were challenged to create a brand that would be a true category of one.

Objectives

- Decrease the number of support calls to sales team

- Increase the number of leads per product

- Increase conversion to selected tailored content for each target audience

Solution

To solve this, we took a bold new approach to traditional luxury, drawing inspiration from the worlds of architecture and fashion. Understanding that our target audience were high net worth individuals who own prestige vehicles, and also enjoyed the thrill that vehicle gives them, our brand purpose honed in on the role ESR plays in bringing back the excitement and joy to your ride.

Our brand proposition of “exceptional comes standard, guaranteed” spoke to the high benchmark of quality ESR achieves, and the brand identity was designed to harmonise the unwavering precision of ESR's technical expertise with the comforting assurance and warmth of its customer interactions. The visual system, built around the refined Neue Haas Grotesk typeface, reflects the relentless pursuit of excellence and the clean, modern aesthetic of their new flagship space in Alexandria.

Nuanced needs

The main audience, architects and designers are looking for inspiration for a project they are working on, or they have been referred to ZETR by their client. They want to explore the product looks and ensure that it fits with their design aesthetic. They want to be able to feel as if they have a relationship with the brand and the product as one seamless experience.

A large and important group to ZETR are their wholesale customers. They use the website for information to understand their customer’s or designer’s aspirations. They are seeking price and building the relationship with the sales team to make it easy to order or ask questions for projects over time. They needed a way to access their discounted pricing through the website, without always having to pick up the phone.

With such minimal interface design, we have emphasised micro-interactions and clever animations to provide the user with brief moments of delightful feedback during the experience. Smart navigation structures change and adapt to the user's choices as they navigate the website.

To help bring each product to life, an art direction based on illumination to highlight the interplay of shadows and light was leveraged. This conceptual approach envisions a design where every curve, angle, and contour is illuminated.

To minimise the manual handling of enquiries by the ZETR team, without diving into a full eComm build, we created a “checkout” which enabled customers to obtain a quote across the entire product range. All products are managed within the CMS (instead of in an eComm platform), with the “cart” being sent to Salesforce via their API, as a lead for the ZETR sales team to follow up with directly. For the user, this functions exactly as a full eComm cart, with a rich amount of data coming through to the Sales team; Name, Phone, Email. Company, Country, Notes and most importantly - the full product list. However, it was built with future scalability in mind - and by using a headless stack, the platform will be able to integrate a true eComm layer in the future.