Boadicea the Victorious sells its fragrances through only a handful of exclusive global retailers, including Harrods, so the website carries much of the weight for sales. But the existing site delivered a slow, frustrating buying journey, at odds with the brand's reputation for impeccable service.

Boadicea needed Magento eCommerce development and design that matched the quality of the product, improved the experience, and drove more sales.

Our first task was to streamline and prioritise Magento's capabilities. That let Boadicea fulfil substantially more orders without hiring more staff.

We ran an audit that flagged slow site speeds, especially on mobile devices, exactly the kind of friction that pushes shoppers to abandon their cart. We made technical adjustments and moved hosting to a new provider, improving both speed and resilience and saving Boadicea £200 a month in the process. The same changes made the system easier for Boadicea's staff to run day to day.

To improve the customer journey and lift conversions, we ran extensive UX testing to uncover friction points. Every test surfaced real opportunities, from a time-saving postcode lookup to scrapping the outdated fax number field. Yes, that was still there. We weighed each finding against its impact on revenue and the workload to fix it, giving Boadicea a clear cost-versus-benefit view of where to invest first.

Design had to work as hard as function. We tailored typography and interactive detail across the site to match a product that sells for up to £7,000 a bottle, so browsing feels considered rather than transactional. The result still looks and feels unmistakably Boadicea, refined rather than reinvented.

Boadicea approached us with an idea that had been years in the making: let customers design their own bottle. Every scent already comes in a hand-crafted glass bottle with its own shield, stopper and story, so an online product configurator wasn't a gimmick. It was a natural extension of what Boadicea already does by hand.

We built customers a way to choose their glass colour, pick from hundreds of shield and stopper combinations, and add a personal engraving, the same kind of eCommerce personalisation you'd expect when speccing a car, but for a bottle that costs between £240 and £7,000. An animated landing page introduces the tool with the same sense of occasion as the bottles themselves, and a built-in Instagram share turns every finished design into marketing Boadicea didn't have to ask for.

Boadicea's site runs on Magento, a platform built for straightforward retail, not thousands of possible bottle combinations. Most agencies would have called a custom product configurator impossible on that platform alone. We didn't.

Rather than replace the system, we built our own eCommerce product configurator on top of it, extending Magento to handle combinations, pricing and engraving logic it was never designed for. We optimised for site speed and search at the same time, so the added complexity of the configurator didn't cost Boadicea performance elsewhere. It launched to a dedicated event in Bahrain, proof that a platform most agencies write off as rigid can still be pushed to do something genuinely new.