Case Study
"...Powerfront have shared Foghorn’s drive for excellence –
they are truly our most valuable partners..."
www.foghorn.com.au is Australia’s first major online, print-on-demand T Shirt house.
The concept for Foghorn was developed during 2005-06 after its founders identified a gaping hole in the Australian market for fully customised T Shirts.
In the fully interactive Foghorn Workshop, customers can create their own, one-off T Shirt design, online, and have it delivered to their door within days – all for around the same price as a mass produced T Shirt.
Foghorn customers can choose their T Shirt, add text, select from a wide range of symbols, layout their design and use a huge array of print colours and textures. Customers also have the flexibility to design the front or back of the T Shirt or both.
Foghorn has sourced the best blank T Shirts from around the world and combined this with a production process which results in extremely high quality, durable prints. Foghorn’s T Shirt range caters for everyone – from babies to big blokes.
With a focus on quality, customer satisfaction and fast turnaround, Foghorn is set to become one of Australia’s most exciting online retailers.
The Challenge
 Foghorn’s two Directors, Charlotte Tottman and Jane Wing, come from senior management backgrounds in fashion manufacturing and communications. Their combined experience convinced them that the T Shirt could be the ultimate platform for self expression.
Their extensive international research suggested that the best place to design a T Shirt was online – in the comfort of the designer’s own space. Charlotte and Jane were adamant that the online experience should be fun and fast, and equal the high quality of the finished product.
The concept was fantastic: all Charlotte and Jane needed was to find a way to deliver their concept though an online interface.
With a specific vision, Foghorn’s brief included the creation of a finely tuned, real-time designing function, which would allow customers to “play” with their T Shirt on screen, producing a very accurate online image of the finished product. Added to this, the design function had to be backed up by a robust and powerful e-commerce capacity which allowed transactions, stock and customer relationships to be tracked and managed efficiently.
Achieving this was far harder than Jane and Charlotte had ever anticipated. “We met with numerous Web Developers, all of whom were completely baffled by what we wanted to achieve. There was very little understanding of the needs of an e-commerce website, let alone a technical capacity to build the design interface we had conceptualised.”
Finally a stroke of luck – and Powerfont’s search engine position – alerted Charlotte and Jane to Powerfront, primarily suppliers of their own Content Management System, but also providers of Web Development Services. After only one meeting with Melbourne Managing Director, Hadar Paz, they were convinced they had found a company who could make their dream a reality.
Foghorn and Powerfront
“We did not look back after the first meeting with Powerfront, Melbourne. Of course we all had no idea how complex and challenging the development of www.foghorn.com.au would prove be at that time – but we were confident from the earliest stage that Powerfont could deliver on our two main requirements: providing a fully functional e-commerce site, plus the high level expertise needed to develop our customised add-on requirements. Happily, our initial assessment of Hadar Paz and the Powerfront team has proven to be absolutely right.”
Hadar Paz took Foghorn’s brief and encouraged his team to “outside the square” in creating an entirely new concept for the T Shirt design function. Although there were several international models to draw on, Powerfont started from scratch, believing that they could do even better. Powerfront designed and developed “The Workshop”, Foghorn’s designing centre, where customers use intuitive tools to create their individual T Shirt print. The Workshop was created in Flash, and has been fully integrated by with Foghorn’s website which is backed by Powerfront's Content Management System.
The appealing look, loading speed, ease of use, clean lines and logical layout of The Workshop has meant that from its earliest days, Foghorn has received only positive feedback from their customers. 
“We have been blown away by the market’s acceptance of the Foghorn website and designing interface. This is a very new concept, and we have customers from tweenies to people in their 50s and 60s – all of them have found the site enjoyable and easy to use.
“For us, the main deliverables from Powerfront have been the absolute excellence in design of The Workshop interface, combined with the main Powerfront site which allows us to continuously change and update our site without the need to refer to external designers. It’s an ideal blend. Powerfront’s excellent e-commerce capacities also allow us to continuously track our transactions, communicate with our market and build our brand – all so critical for a start-up business.
“Most importantly, Powerfront have shared Foghorn’s drive for excellence – they value their client relationships and are as obsessive about our business as we are! Hadar Paz and his team are truly our most valuable partners.”
So, if you’ve ever had a great idea for a customised T Shirt, go to www.foghorn.com.au. And, if you’ve ever had a great idea for a website, talk to Powerfront.
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Company Overview 
