Historic Newspapers
Product & Transformation Lead
Brief
Oversee the redesign of all books, re-platfrom the business onto Shopify and integrate with Wonderbly’s print-on-demand book rendering engine API.
Role
I managed internal and external teams over nine months, ensuring collaboration and alignment whilst maintaining quality and budget.
Results
The new site launched on time and within budget. Sales of the redesigned products are up over 200%.
In 2023, Historic Newspapers was acquired by Wonderbly, the leading global personalised books publisher. The following year, Wonderbly initiated the digital transformation of Historic Newspapers, which I successfully led from rebrand to relaunch. Delivering the project on time and within budget.
Developing the new book cover templates. These were built into the new content management system. This allowed the Historic Newspaper team to generate new book covers. Each one always to spec. and consistent in layout and typography.
I managed the redesign of the book cover templates to support the publishing of over 340 historical newspaper books covering sport, military history, world events, and collected front cover reprints. This involved coordinating with third-party agencies while working alongside Wonderbly's in-house engineering team to establish a new content management publishing platform for the book catalogue.
A rather pleasing collection of the football books available from Historic Newspapers. Each available in up to three colour ways and two designs.
The project included setting up a green field Shopify instance that connected to Wonderbly's page rendering API and global print-on-demand network.
I provided direction for the UX and UI design of bespoke e-commerce product pages that enabled product customisation and personalisation. Throughout the process, I maintained budget oversight and facilitated cross-business collaboration sessions.
Developing the UX for book cover personalisation to be handed over to the engineers to build into the Shopify template. This called the Wonderbly API which rendered each order individually and sent out to the global print network for fulfilment.
My role concluded with comprehensive handover and training for the Historic Newspapers team on both the book catalogue CMS and Shopify product setup.
The key skills I brought to this project included tight team and budgetary management, the ability to communicate effectively with both designers and engineers, precision in design and agency briefings and prompt communication and escalation of challenges.
All new product photography was commissioned. Attention was paid to ensuring the hero product shots communicated what the books are.
The transformation delivered significant results: a platform capable of supporting unrestricted product growth, elimination of engineering involvement from book publishing and site updates, and the ability to launch in new locales with minimal engineering input. The early commercial indicators outstripped expectations.
A little bit of fun at the end of the two day photoshoot. Annie Leibovitz doesn’t do photoshoots for newspaper books. But if she did, it might look like this.