George Harrison has been a fixture of Auckland CBD's retail precinct since 1930, curating leading international designer labels for the modern man – Versace Jeans Couture, Just Cavalli, Diesel and Karl Lagerfeld among them. More than ninety years on, it remains a destination for the design-conscious shopper, with a reputation built on selection and service rather than scale.
George Harrison wanted an online experience worthy of the store: substantially elevated, matched to the expectations of a luxury customer, and capable of delivering a long wishlist of design and functionality. That meant moving off NOP onto Shopify – and doing it without building something bespoke and expensive that the team would then be tied to maintaining.
The data was the real risk. Migrating customers, orders and over 900 SKUs off NOP meant working with files that were fragmented, corrupt and missing crucial information, with no margin for error on a live retail business. Beyond the migration, the existing filtering, size guides, collections and navigation simply didn't meet the needs of the business – a product data architecture problem rather than a front-end one. And the redesign had to feel contemporary without discarding the heritage of a brand approaching its centenary.
Our UX/UI Design, Commerce Strategy and Engineering teams worked in unison, identifying key risk factors before the migration and build rather than discovering them midway through. The guiding principle was to use native Shopify functionality wherever possible – keeping code complexity down, the project lean, and the site genuinely manageable for the George Harrison team afterwards. The design process ran on an agile structure, keeping the client in the work rather than reviewing it at the end.
Our engineering team rebuilt the data points from the ground up to guarantee parity and cohesiveness across the site. The website was completely redesigned for the design-conscious luxury shopper while holding onto the brand's roots and feel.
Product data architecture was rebuilt to support cohesive filtering and relevant size guides. Automated collections took the ongoing manual work out of seasonal and outlet ranges. Navigation was rebuilt using real customer journey data. Tracking snippets and missing pixels were installed, paving the way for automation and POS integration in future.
The result is an elevated commerce experience at a lower total cost of ownership – already delivering a double-digit conversion rate improvement, with tasks that once took hours now running in minutes or automatically.
