Realm’s team rebuilt the customer-facing journey end-to-end: registration and sign-in, browsing and search, the product catalogue, and checkout. Each step was redesigned around how customers moved through the site. The underlying platform Realm had already built for Exclusive Books stayed in place, avoiding a second, unrelated migration risk.
Registration, browsing, and checkout
The rebuild simplified registration and checkout, expanded and cleaned up the product catalogue, and improved the stability of the underlying platform, all while preserving the visual identity customers recognised as Exclusive Books. Checkout and account flows were rebuilt in full, which is what made the resulting speed and reliability gains possible.
Mapping the journey
Before writing any of that code, Realm ran structured design thinking workshops with Exclusive Books: empathise, define, ideate, and test. Personas were interviewed and mapped end to end, including students, and the rebuild addressed the friction points these workshops surfaced.
A partnership built for responsiveness
When Exclusive Books decided the rebuild needed to happen, it didn’t need to brief in an unfamiliar team or wait for anyone to get up to speed on a live, revenue-critical platform first. Because Realm and Exclusive Books had worked together continuously since the initial rebuild, the new build happened alongside day-to-day platform support. When Exclusive Books partnered with Uber Eats early in the pandemic to deliver books to customers at home, or when Black Friday created sudden spikes in demand, the same team that had just rebuilt the platform was in place to respond immediately.
Building a roadmap for what comes next
Once the rebuild was live, Realm and Exclusive Books moved into a formal digital strategy engagement: a current-state assessment followed by a roadmap, giving the business a structured plan to guide future investment in the site.
