Dugdale
Seamless design and e-commerce integration power Dugdale Bros & Co website
Dugdale Bros & Co (Dugdale) has been weaving quality into every thread since 1896. As a trusted clothmaker and merchant from Huddersfield, supplying tailors and fashion houses around the world, the business needed an online experience to match its prestige. Seeking The Bigger Boat’s expertise, the business wanted to create a seamless e-commerce platform that respected its heritage while making it easier for customers to shop and its team to manage.
The challenge
For Dugdale, this project ran deeper than creating a new website. It needed to balance rich tradition with technology. With more than a century of heritage behind the business, its online experience had to reflect the elegance and prestige its customers know and expect. At the same time, it needed to deliver a slick user experience for shoppers and in-house users alike.
One major hurdle was brought by Dugdale’s complex product catalogue. With thousands of unique SKUs – each differing in weight, weave, pattern, and more – we needed a way to present technical details clearly and consistently. This meant marrying rich content with an intuitive user experience (UX).
Then there was stock. For a business dealing in fabric by the metre, real-time availability is vital. Manual updates were out of the question. The company needed a live sync with its textile management system (TMS) to prevent overselling and ensure a smooth order process.
Customer care was equally important. Dugdale has long prided itself on close, personal relationships. The new website needed to support this – with account management, order history and personalised service – while remaining scalable for future growth.
Ultimately, this was a project all about the fine details, much like the care and attention needed to make Dugdale’s world-famous cloth.
Our solution
We designed and developed a custom WordPress and WooCommerce solution that gave Dugdale a high-end digital presence – one that’s as beautiful as it is functional. A stunning creative captured the sophistication of its brand, with clean layouts and high-resolution imagery to showcase every fabric in detail.
The technical backbone was our custom API integration with Dugdale’s internal TMS. It handled real-time product syncing, adding and removing products as required while ensuring prices and descriptions are accurate. Plus, by ensuring stock levels by the metre are continuously updated, it prevents any risk of overselling to streamline operations and enhance the customer experience. This is compounded by live order processing, which keeps customer information, product orders, and delivery details fully in sync, maintaining a truly frictionless journey for the customer and significantly reducing admin for the team.
We also brought intuitive navigation, filtered search, and detailed product specs to help customers make confident choices. The site is fully responsive too, ensuring a smooth experience across all devices for the ultimate shopping convenience.
And, keen to ensure a smooth migration process and deliver long-term SEO value, we optimised the site’s structure and content to give Dugdale the best chance of increased visibility in Google after launch.
Rob Charnock,
director at Dugdale Bros & Co.
Lee Boothroyd,
director at The Bigger Boat
