<strong>Today's the day the Teddy Bears have their new website... with the launch of a plush, new Magento 2 site built by the team here at Actuate! </strong>

Yes, it's time for our team to break out the picnic basket filled with marmalade and honey as we celebrate the successful launch of Be My Bear's new retail and wholesale stores built on the Magento 2 platform.

The website was a labour of love for our team, who took the sites from M1 to M2 with a brand-new design stuffed with lots of new features and functionality. Before we tell you what Actuate did, please allow us a moment to introduce our client.
<h2>Who Are Be My Bear</h2>
Be My Bear is an award-winning teddy bear manufacturer based in North Wales specialising in make your own bears similar to the Build-a-Bear experience. Founded in 2001, the company has grown to become the largest make your own bear supplier in the United Kingdom, regularly supplying its bears to celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Tamara Ecclestone and TV shows including The X Factor, The Apprentice and Killing Eve.
Be My Bear have been clients of Actuate for several years. This latest move to Magento 2 was the perfect opportunity to create a genuinely customer-centric website focused wholly on a fantastic user experience.
<h3>What Actuate Did</h3>
Actuate spent the day with Be My Bear discussing their wants and needs, analysing data from Google Analytics and HotJar and developing customer personas to facilitate the building process and make accurate decisions based on real-world data.

Actuate Digital gave competitors websites the once over, including leading sites in the toy and games sector, to make sure we had a deep understanding of the industry as a whole.

The data gleaned from our day with Be My Bear and the subsequent research allowed us to develop designs for the new website which appealed to their customers and answered their needs, driving conversions and negating customer drop-off.

For Be My Bear's retail arm, we found that visitors to their website didn't necessarily understand the differences between each of their main product types. We ensured that the new website introduced people to each product within their respective drop-down menus, meaning people knew what was on offer without the need to click through to each category, increasing the user experience.

Increasing average order value was of high importance for the new retail website, which we addressed in several ways, including:
<ul>
 	<li>One-click upsells on product pages.</li>
 	<li>Visual cues to increase spending in exchange for free delivery.</li>
 	<li>Allowing past purchases to be reordered from your account.</li>
 	<li>Utilising countdowns to create a sense of urgency on sale items.</li>
</ul>
The new website not only focuses on the customer journey up to the point of sale; it also shapes the customer journey after a sale happens. Users are encouraged to post about their order from the order confirmation screen; we also urge product reviews through emails sent post-delivery.

When it came to Be My Bear's wholesale arm, we again focused on their clients, with a great deal of time spent on evolving the customer account pages. We transformed the customer account to become a useful resource for their customers that also contained news, upcoming days of importance and direct downloads of banners and POS material. These changes to the account area added value to Be My Bear's offering and helped increase order value and spend.

Overall we could BEARly contain our excitement with the resulting website and can't wait to see how it performs for Be My Bear over the coming months.

If your website is a little "Pooh" or you require an agency that won't "Bungle" the job, please pick up the phone and call Actuate Digital today. Our bear puns may be bad, but our websites are absolutely amazing!