Making Personalisation Easy – Trenance Chocolates Case Study

Trenance Chocolates make luxury handmade chocolates in Cornwall, UK. Focusing on bringing the customer flavours they’ll love within fantastic chocolate.

As part of this desire to give customers the right flavours, they’ve created a “Design your own box” tool on the website. So if you want a box entirely packed with dark chocolate fruit flavours – you’ve got it!

This is personalisation by product selection rather than putting your initials or a photo on it. On their website they’ve executed it really simply. You would think that allowing someone to build a box of chocolates from a choice of 69 different chocolates would be complex, but it’s a breeze. Let’s see how they’ve done it:

First up they’ve given the category a really clear title – “Choose your own box”. And they’ve listed it directly under the “boxed chocolates” category. So customers will see it, and will immediately understand what it means.

The next step is to choose the size of your box, this determines the price too.

Then comes the time to choose your chocolates.

The instructions are very clear:

The customer can see:

• What they’re buying “£7.96 per Box of 12”
• How many chocolates they’ve selected “Selected: 0 of 12”
• Select their lid colour, and put in a gift message if they choose
• As well as the very clear instructions

The layout is so intuitive though, that I doubt many people read the instructions (but don’t get rid of them!):

There are 69 chocolates to choose from, so they’ve immediately split them into 3 colour coded tabs.

Then there is fantastic photography and the names are really clear. All the customer has to do here is to click the “Add” button.

The one thing I’d suggest changing on this screen is to order the chocolates by most popular – I may just not understand chocolate, but I’d be surprised if Apple is your number on best selection!

As the customer adds the chocolates it changes the left hand bar like this:

So the customer can use the plus and minus to build up their box to the number they’re allowed (hint: if anyone wants to buy me a box – these are my favourites!). I like this layout because it makes it very easy to visually see where you are in the box building stages.

And if the customer tries to go over – then this happens:

I like the way this pop up works, but I’d make the text a bit more on brand – the copy around the site is really nice and friendly and this could easily be changed to fit with that. Something like, “We know it’s hard to restrain yourself with our gorgeous chocolates but you’re going to have to keep to the 12! Just click OK to go back and make your changes”.

Once the product is submitted the basket then makes it really clear what’s being bought too:

This is where the customer can increase the number of boxes – or go and build another one!

How do you use personalisation in your business? Could you do a personal selection box?

Let me know how you get on.