Nuria Beauty Case Study: Supporting Girls’ Education and Brightening Skin Worldwide

Using the powerful WooCommerce platform, we’ve helped a host of businesses improve their existing stores and increase their online revenues.

We’ve also had a number of companies that have come to us for brand new sites in order to build their eCommerce presence from the ground up. Such was the case with Nuria Beauty, a worldly skincare brand dedicated to supporting girls’ education.

Fulfilling a Passion

Before starting Nuria Beauty, Naomi Furgiuele worked developing skincare products for Johnson & Johnson’s Global Beauty Face & Sun Care R&D division. During this time, she traveled all over the world, discovering the myriad ways that women addressed their skin issues.

Throughout her travels, her daughters were never far from her mind. All over the world, she noticed how difficult it could be for girls to obtain the education they needed. When education was available, it was pivotal in the lives of these young women.

In starting Nuria, it was important that her experiences and philosophy influenced the brand. With her history in skincare, she saw that she could combine these distinct beauty rituals from across the world with an emphasis on supporting girls’ education.

Using natural ingredients and skincare regimens from the world over, Nuria products are designed to make skin healthier and more radiant. To help young women of the world get the education they need, a portion of all sales goes to She’s The First, a non-profit organization fighting gender inequality through education.

Expanding Their Reach

The plan for Nuria was to start simple and expand to more and more markets outside of the US.

At coolblueweb, we practice an Agile approach to development, iterating improvements in twice-monthly cycles to achieve a minimum viable product (MVP). Once that first goal is met, we move the goal posts and develop toward that next goal.

In Nuria’s case, Naomi wanted to start with the launch of the US site. Their soft launch went out to friends and family, during which time they got first impressions for any possible changes before their official US launch.

Their second goal was to launch their Hong Kong site, followed by other sites throughout the Asia Pacific region. All subsequent Nuria sites will be subdomains of the main through WooCommerce’s multisite capabilities.

Key to this international expansion is the ability to deliver regional sites in multiple languages. For example, the US and Canada site could be shown in English as well as French. In order to make this happen with minimal difficulty, they needed a plugin that could simply deliver translations across site content.

Enter WordPress Multilingual (WPML). With WPML, Nuria will be able to easily translate site content to alternative languages which can be toggled as needed by visitors. Strings can be assigned to WordPress users for translation or WPML can be connected to a translation service.

Currently, translations are in process for Nuria and not yet available on site.

WooCommerce & coolblueweb

In order to accomplish what Nuria wanted from their new site, we needed certain plugin functionalities. With WooCommerce, there are nearly endless possible extensions and plugins to deliver exactly what our clients need. Here are a few that we used for Nuria’s site.

• WooCommerce Points and Rewards – Customer loyalty is important to Nuria. To entice customers to keep coming back, they wanted to have a system which rewarded their customers for sticking with them. WooCommerce Points and Rewards allows Nuria to give customers points each time they purchase, resulting in an eventual discount. In future development, we plan to customize this plugin to be more tailored to Nuria’s business.
• WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing – With this extension, Nuria has the ability to offer rule-based discounts. They can add rules dictating discounts for a quantity of product added to a cart or for a monetary value of a cart. This capability is not yet in use on the site.
• WooCommerce Round Up for Charity – Charity is a very important part of the Nuria brand. While Nuria already gives a portion of their sales to She’s The First, they wanted to give customers the ability to give extra during checkout. IgniteWoo’s WooCommerce Round Up for Charity extension was exactly what they needed to make this happen. In the checkout page, customers can choose to add any amount to their order to go to She’s The First.

  

• Section Builder – To enable Nuria to simply create new pages themselves, we used a custom plugin that was built in-house at coolblueweb. Similar to plugins such as Visual Composer and WPBakery, Section Builder allows users to make new pages with pre-defined content blocks. Since it integrates seamlessly into WordPress by way of Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), it feels and works like a native feature. Section Builder functions within the designs of each site and keeps users from accidentally diverging from them.
  

  

  

Moving Forward

Although Nuria has launched their US and Hong Kong sites, they’ve got a clear roadmap ahead for future improvements. Moving the goalposts forward with each iterative improvement, we aim to get them exactly where they want to be for all their future development needs.

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Sean Flannigan is the Digital Marketing Specialist at coolblueweb, WooExperts based entirely in Seattle.