Camper Australia

Camper Australia has 5 retail stores in Australia’s largest shopping centers. My work with Camper Australia involved art direction and project management.

My first job was to design and integrate the Camper gift vouchers with the point of sale system. Success showed my design and technical competence.

Creative content for Camper Australia is mostly produced in Spain and it was my responsibility to localise all advertising and deliver final artwork to Sydney and Melbourne publications. The Camper Australia website was however designed, produced and hosted in Australia. This was the largest project I managed, in conjunction with the e-newsletter.

Meetings with store managers generated a list of website features to improve customer service. We also looked closely at the Camper International site and identified numerous areas to improve. The site requirements were:

• Display over 200 shoes in male, female and children categories.
• Each season new stock added to the site (photography required).
• Prices need to be changed easily and quickly.
• Time to find a desired shoe needed to be reduced (under 2 minutes).
• General availability of stock to be displayed with shoes.
• SEO for each shoe page featuring the SKU code and description.
• Store locations registered with Google Places.
• Camper Australia newsletter subscription and unsubscribe form.
• Quick email links to Camper store managers.
• Facebook likes for each shoe.

An Excel spreadsheet was used to populate the database, using a PHP parsing script. The stores managers would modify this document and upload to the site. Performing editing functions offline greatly increased the speed and reduced the cost of the site.

The biggest performance increase was in the search time for shoes, which was reduced to approx. 10 seconds, using a simple and effective visual search method.

The most successful campaign I managed was the Camper Australia newsletter. All customers were encouraged to complete an in-store subscription form to be notified of sales and the arrival of new stock. The cost of running the email campaign was 5% of previous advertising and generated a 500% increase in store traffic.

My time working with Camper Australia was great fun. I was given every opportunity to do the best work for Camper. Peter Attrill, managing director, was very encouraging and has become a good friend … and still calls me with iPhone questions.