Walgreens Boots Alliance: No7Company

The Client

Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) is a global leader in retail pharmacy, impacting millions of lives every day through dispensing medicines and providing accessible, high-quality care. Developed by Boots, No7Company is a popular brand of skincare and cosmetics.

The Situation

No7Company and its related product brands have lived under the umbrella of its parent company, Boots. But brand stakeholders realized that the brand needed to have its own strong digital presence. They knew they needed to launch a standalone No7Company.com website, allowing the brand to stand on its own, reaching investors, B2B customers and career candidates. 

The Challenge

There were a number of challenges to overcome to build a site that would meet WBA and No7Company’s needs. The parent company and beauty brands needed to share the same digital management team. Additionally, to unify communication efforts, the company and brands needed a single place to manage important digital assets such as images, video and documents.

The Solution

Understanding it needed to be able to effectively reach investors, news media, employees and prospective employees, WBA tapped VMLY&R to lead its digital efforts. To build the site quickly, VMLY&R took advantage of Drupal multisite capabilities, “borrowing” from WalgreensBootsAlliance.com’s codebase to rapidly build and deploy No7Company.com. This approach allowed the teams to build on the foundation of WalgreensBootsAlliance.com, creating a familiar, easy-to-use interface for content administrators.

VMLY&R also took advantage of extensible contributed Drupal modules to integrate No7's social media account feeds into key pages on the site in customizable ways. Now, No7 content administrators can easily add single or combined social media feeds to any page with just a few clicks of the mouse, further driving engagement and reminding visitors of No7's cultural and human influences.

Using Acquia Cloud allowed the VMLY&R team to rapidly develop and deploy a new site, significantly increasing speed to market and allowing No7 to more easily communicate in a powerful, evocative manner over the course of just a few development sprints — while simultaneously simplifying hosting and website management and reducing costs. 

The Results

The new No7Company.com site provides a standalone platform for the beauty brand, its content and media. The brand is now able to stand on its own, allowing for more effective promotion.