Manchester Digital presents How We Solved It – a brand new series spotlighting the ingenuity of our members. Each piece explores how businesses across our community are tackling challenges head-on, finding creative solutions, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in tech.
For the first piece in this new series, we spoke to award-winning strategic and creative digital marketing agency Soap Media.
The Challenge
Minerva is the UK’s largest fabric retailer, with 100,000+ products and a thriving maker community. When they came to us, their brand identity and site didn’t reflect what made them special: creativity, craft, and community. The biggest opportunity to be found, and therefore the biggest challenge to conquer, was that the e-commerce experience sat apart from where the real magic happened (their Facebook group). Minerva asked for a “brand refresh.” We suspected they needed more: a brand system and a platform that fused social inspiration with shopping.
Why It Mattered
Their community was already promoting the brand organically, but that value lived on third-party platforms. Inspiration and purchase were therefore entirely disconnected. By closing that gap, we knew we could bolster business benefits by reducing missed revenue, fostering stronger brand loyalty, and creating a brand that felt like the home of UK sewing culture. The latter was especially important as we later helped Minerva to push their brand into new international markets.
Our Approach
Brand first, product next. We reframed Minerva's identity around those three earlier-mentioned C’s: creativity, craft, and community. We built a bold, flexible logo, refreshed typography and colour, and created a modular graphic system that could stretch from packaging to product pages.
“Instagram inside” the store. We designed a community-driven platform where makers upload projects, tag Minerva products, follow hashtags, and browse personalised feeds. From any project, customers can click a product tag and add it straight to the cart.
Architecture that keeps up. We shipped a split architecture with a Next.js front end with React components, backed by PHP and Sylius. Because social features create heavy read traffic, we added an advanced Elastic search backed caching layer to power live feeds and trending projects without sacrificing speed.
Findability and format. Deep search and filters let people explore by skill level, project type (e.g. quilting, bag-making, etc), products, or trends. We launched MinervaTV for tutorials and new-fabric spotlights, and prepared for affiliate opportunities as creators drive sales.
Going global. We incorporated multi-currency (USD, CAD, EUR), geo-based pricing/shipping, metres to yards switching, and a seamless international checkout. We also built digital product flows for PDF patterns, secure downloads, A0 print add-ons, and dynamic order routing. Incredibly, this most recent phase also included reporting and print-on-demand tooling behind the scenes!
The Outcome
Minerva now has a platform where people connect, share, and shop in one place. Results include:
● +92% organic traffic
● +18% keywords in Top 3
● +10% page-one keywords
Ultimately, this was all driven by the creation of a brand and online experience that looks and behaves like its community.
What We Learned
● Treat brand and product as one system; the logo, UI, and community mechanics should tell the same story.
● Performance is a feature. Plan caching and data models early when you add social behaviours.
● Bring inspiration closer to checkout to shorten the path from “I love that” to “I’m making that”.
● Design for growth from day one. This was especially valuable for Minerva's international expansion with currency, units, and shipping logic.
● Community features create new opportunities (content, affiliates, etc) but also new responsibilities (governance, clear tagging, scalable ops, etc).
To find out more about Soap Media, click here.
