CASE STUDY
A Personal Touch: 8 West Transforms Jo Malone London’s Online Personalisation Journey
Summary
Jo Malone London wanted to extend its established in-store gifting and personalisation experience into ecommerce, creating a premium online journey where customers could personalise selected fragrances and candles. 8 West delivered a phased research, UX, and development programme that brought product selection, engraving, charms, embossing, pricing, and basket functionality into one guided digital experience.
The Challenge
Personalisation had long been part of Jo Malone London's gifting experience in stores and at events, but its online offering was more limited. It existed as two separate legacy systems and each carried its own logic, interface, and constraints, making the customer journey fragmented and harder to maintain or extend. Customers could not move easily from product selection to customisation within a single, intuitive journey.
The brief was to create a single, unified personalisation experience, while also introducing new features entirely: alphabet and message charm personalisation. The solution needed to work within Jo Malone London's existing Drupal platform and established product, product personalisation and basket APIs, support customers arriving via a product selector, a direct product-page link or returning from the cart, and maintain a premium, on-brand experience across desktop and mobile.
The technical complexity sat behind what needed to feel like a simple journey. Different product types had different engraving rules, personalisation options needed to update visually and in real time, and the basket logic had to avoid duplicate products or incorrect combinations.
The Solution
8 West approached the work in two phases.
Phase one: Research and usability testing
The team reviewed and tested two proposed customer flows with existing and new Jo Malone London customers, producing a usability report, gap analysis, and recommendations that shaped the design before development began.
Phase two: Design and development
8 West consolidated the two legacy personalisation systems into a single CMS template within Drupal, and added charm personalisation as a new feature alongside engraving and embossing.
The resulting experience allowed customers to personalise selected colognes and candles through:
- Bottle and cap engraving
- Message and alphabet charms
- Box embossing design selection
- Real-time visual updates as options were selected
- Dynamic pricing and a persistent Add to Bag call to action, with a label that updates based on product and personalisation choices selected
- Full-screen product preview
- Deep linking from product pages, with the ability to return to the cart to edit selections
The build used GraphQL to retrieve product information and existing APIs to add personalised products to the basket, with new templates and modular front-end components structuring the experience within the existing CMS.
The Outcome
The project brought together two legacy tools and a new feature into one coherent, scalable personalisation experience for Jo Malone London, initially supporting colognes and candles.
Consolidating previously separate systems into a single template gives Jo Malone London a stronger foundation to maintain and extend personalisation going forward, rather than managing multiple disconnected tools. The phased approach, grounded in usability testing before development, also gave the brand a structured way to validate the experience with real customers ahead of a wider rollout.
Conclusion
Personalisation is not a single feature; it touches product data, pricing, basket logic, content, and brand storytelling all at once. Consolidating fragmented legacy tools into one well-structured template, rather than adding new capability on top of separate systems, created a stronger, more maintainable foundation for Jo Malone London to build on.
Research and usability testing allowed the team to validate the customer flow before development began, reducing the risk of misjudging the customer experience and giving both teams confidence in the design ahead of a wider rollout. This phased approach also builds on the momentum of personalisation's success in store, giving Jo Malone London a scalable way to bring that same experience online.
To view the experience, visit https://www.jomalone.co.uk/customisation
Technologies
| Category | Technology / Component |
| CMS | Drupal |
| Frontend |
HTML, CSS, JavaScript
|
| Data retrieval | GraphQL |
| Integration |
Existing product and basket APIs
|
| UXDR |
Userlytics, Figma
|
| Templates | Consolidated CMS template |
