Ashley & Lewis
Colour library and in-store kiosk
A custom colour library for a paint merchant that deliberately does not sell online. 660 shades from three houses, a swatch book the customer builds and keeps, and a touchscreen in the shop that picks the same list back up.
the brief
Ashley & Lewis stock paint and paper from three houses, and they sell it across a counter in Godalming. Not selling online was their decision and a deliberate one: the value is in the conversation with people who have spent a lifetime in the trade, and a checkout cannot have that conversation.
So the site is not a shop. Its job is to show the whole range, let somebody work out what they want in their own time, and hand that to a person rather than to a payment processor.
The second half of the problem was the shop itself. A customer who had done the work at home arrived with a screenshot, or a photograph of a screenshot, or a colour name half remembered.
what was built
- 660 colours from the three houses, searchable by name, number, brand, family and tone, each one showing its near matches in the other two. The matching is computed rather than eyeballed, so a near match is near by the same measure every time.
- Light reflectance is worked out from the colour and labelled as approximate until the manufacturer's published figure is entered, at which point it says so.
- Every wallpaper collection the two paper houses make, 600 colourways across 138 collections, with the paints that hang with each one.
- A swatch book the customer builds as they go and groups into rooms, saved against a short code rather than an account. It expires after ninety days.
- Take it with you: to a phone, to an email, or picked up later on any screen with that code. The code becomes a QR that is generated on the shop's own server, so a customer's list is never handed to a third party to draw.
- Send the list to the counter, where a screen behind the till chimes and raises it as the customer walks up.
- A room calculator for paint and paper, a plain guide to what each of the twenty-eight finishes is for, and colour matching from a photograph, which runs in the browser so the photograph never leaves the phone it was taken on.
- A relay for getting that photograph onto a screen: scan the code, send one picture, and it is deleted as it is read.
- A 21-inch Windows touchscreen in the shop running a kiosk build of the same application, remotely managed and monitored, which clears itself down after three minutes so the next customer never finds the last one's list.
- The kiosk collects nothing. No name, no number, and an email address is used to send the list and then forgotten, so a screen on a wall cannot quietly become a mailing list.
- Behind it: two-factor sign-in, three staff roles, a PIN on the till machine, and a report of the searches that came back with nothing, which is the shop finding out what people ask for that they do not stock.
outcome
The shop screen and the website share one list, so a customer can start at home and finish at the counter, or the other way round, and neither of them has to explain themselves twice.
Nothing about it competes with the counter. It gets somebody to the point where the conversation is worth having, and then it stops.
- client
- Ashley & Lewis
- sector
- Retail
- disciplines
- web development, application design, kiosk deployment
- website
- www.ashleylewis-paint.com
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