Impact

MECCA opened its first store in Melbourne in 1997, while its website launched in 2001. Today, it brings 120 of the world’s most celebrated beauty and skincare brands to millions of Australian customers. Symplicit partnered with MECCA to create engaging shopping experiences by understanding emerging purchase journeys and in-store and online experience preferences.

Value

Actionable insights and human-centred artefacts enabled MECCA to build a roadmap for customer experience enhancements across their online and instore experiences. By developing personas and journey maps grounded in immersive research, the team could identify quick wins and longer-term strategic moves to address customer pain points and strengthen relationships.

Process

MECCA operates three retail brands and an online store, each with nuanced customer requirements and desired shopping experience. Symplicit designed a three-phased approach to deliver impactful insights for differentiated customer needs:

First, a discovery phase explored how customers engage with MECCA, research beauty products, and make purchase decisions. To build this understanding, Symplicit conducted in-depth interviews, undertook contextual inquiries to observe in-store shopping experiences, and completed usability testing of the MECCA website to understand the online shopping experience. The findings were synthesised to create customer journey maps and personas, guiding the ideation of new concepts. Symplicit co-designed experience enhancements with MECCA designers and stakeholders using these customer artefacts. A long list of customer-focused ideas was created, evaluated, and prioritised by the team, creating a roadmap of initiatives for improvement.

Lastly, the team collaborated with MECCA designers to build out key ideas and produce prototypes for prioritised and strategic concepts. Symplicit then used these prototypes to conduct further user testing, providing feedback on areas requiring further development, iteration and enhancement for successful delivery.

Mindset

The team used a design thinking approach to understand the nuanced ways MECCA customers engage with their physical and digital environments. This mindset ensured that the customer's voice was central to developing a roadmap of concepts so MECCA could continue to reshape the retail beauty experience.