Anomaly London's Paul Graham on Umbro's new website

“We’ve been helping Umbro relaunch their entire brand (and hopefully restore it to its former glory if we’re any good) since the end of last year. Our first major project with them was to help with the brand, PR, digital, social media, and retail strategies for the launch of the new England Football home shirt. Out of that project it was clear they needed a digital destination as everyone would be looking them up online if we did a half decent job of the launch. So we set them up in the social media world, advised them on various social networking sites, got them blogging, and came up with the concept for Phase 1 of umbro.com. After holding a pitch for them on who to get to produce it (we prefer to collaborate rather than build in-house) we drafted in Perfect Fools to build what is now the ‘England’ section, but at the time was the whole site.

More recently, we presented Umbro with a global digital strategy, at the heart of which was a living breathing “web-a-mag-a-log”, a website that could be constantly evolving and publishing interesting opinions on the world of football culture like a magazine or a blog, whilst at the same time being a catalog for product done in more intuitive, engaging, entertaining way. It was important not to take ourselves seriously, to play nicely with other web-dwellers, bigging up blogs we like, linking to other places on the web and acknowledging (even embracing) the fact that there’s nowhere to hide on the web - hence showcasing our lowpoints as well as our highpoints of kit design. Rokkan did this part of the build, working into our head of design and our head of digital. We hope to keep the content surprising, useful, fun, and a joy to interact with. Umbro themselves are hugely involved and have really taken their newfound digital existence to heart.

The customisation module that went live yesterday is just the latest in our “master plan” if you can call it that, and Enjoy This were the builders this time round. We’re really proud of it, and we’ve loved working with them as they gelled really well with us and helped our creatives truly realise and sometimes even augment our ideas.

Watch this space, as there’ll be more…”

Paul Graham is the founder of Anomoly’s London office. You can also follow Anomoly London on Twitter.

— Posted on September 1st, 2009 by Daniel in: Making ofDesign process

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