A seamless migration to Magento 2

With a passion for brows, market-leading products and first-class training, HD Brows belief that ‘brows are as unique as fingerprints’ underpins all that they do. Thousands of stylists have grown their careers with HD Brows, but they weren’t ready to stop there. They wanted their eCommerce offering to reflect their position in the world of beauty.

Having previously worked with the HD Beauty Group to migrate another of their sites, Nouveau Lashes, to Magento 2, they came back to IDHL for the same expert support with this M1 migration.

With an existing Magento 2 instance for Nouveau Lashes, we leveraged this to support the rebuilding of HD Brows. A full Magento Commerce build, we breathed life into the designs supplied to us while mirroring the impressive functionality of their Nouveau Lashes store.

Moving to an up-to-date eCommerce platform not only removed the risks associated with running the unsupported Magento 1 platform, but it also streamlined the admin and management experiences across the two businesses, increasing their efficiencies.With two audiences to cater for, HD Brows needed two storefronts – one for their consumers and a pro level store for trade professionals. Working with this additional layer of complexity, login functionality was accommodated within the designs alongside relevant products, bundles and training.

A unique challenge to overcome was that Pro products require the shopper to be trained to certain levels to purchase or even see a price. To cope with this, two attributes were created, one for the customer and one for the product. This enables a customer to be checked against a product and ensure they are permitted to purchase the item before the price and ‘add to basket’ button is displayed. Where a user doesn’t have the appropriate qualifications, they are instead shown a CTA block encouraging training to be booked.

Housing a wealth of content on WordPress, we faced a fresh integration with WordPress due to the significant Magento 2 changes versus their previous Magento 1 implementation. To reach a solution, we used a WordPress plugin that allows the Magento theme Header and Footer to be applied across WordPress powered pages. Creating a seamless user experience, continuity has been ensured with login status and the mini basket always displayed for ease of access.

Adding to the user experience, third party integrations were also implemented. A Klarna checkout. Trust Pilot was also migrated from the previous site to showcase reviews while Vimeo enables a rich and engaging experience with the introduction of video.

A Magento instance isn’t the only thing shared between HD Brows and Nouveau Lashes. Both use PeopleVox for their warehouse management system. What would usually be a straightforward integration was made complex due to migrating to a pre-existing Magento 2 instance already integrated with PeopleVox for Nouveau Lashes.

The warehouse needs to be capable of recognising whether the stock is from HD Brows or Nouveau Lashes inventory. As such, there was no margin for error and a full new integration specification was required.

Undertaking a data migration comprising of customers, products and order history, the challenge was to pull data for HD Brows onto the Magento 2 instance without rewriting what was already there. Reconsidering our approach to data migration, extensions were used to differentiate data between the two businesses which allowed us to overcome this challenge.