Responses by Engine Digital

Background: Shaping the theatrical industry since the 1800s, Samuel French is the world’s leading publisher and licensor of plays and musicals. We created a digital experience that reimagines the exploration of Samuel French’s massive catalog while honoring the legacy of the Samuel French brand and the experience of live theater. The site’s goal is to provide a robust experience for a broad audience with varied levels of knowledge in theater and producing plays and musicals.

Highlights: Since Samuel French’s printed scripts are iconic in the theater community, we translated the script covers to a digital layout to elevate standard licensable titles. For titles with substantial amounts of promotional content, we created a premier layout that features bold, theatrical imagery. Lastly, the use of prop imagery throughout the site serves as a nod to the theatre world.

Navigational structure: The Samuel French catalogue contains over 26,000 products, consisting mainly of theatrical titles, each unique in its complexity and characteristics. This matrix needed to be navigated by producers, especially for small-scale productions. Through product tagging and filtering, the new site’s Show Search feature helps users narrow in on the titles that match their unique requirements.

Favorite details: The website’s new license estimator lets users quickly calculate potential costs associated with a particular show based on ticket price, number of seats and performances and whether music and scripts are needed. It also helps the Samuel French licensing team be more efficient with their time and assist users in other areas.

Technical features: The website used WordPress on the front-end as a headless CMS, which integrated with an existing Laravel application powering the e-commerce back-end. Because of its unique nature, the site has a robust and custom back-end system that required integration with the front-end interaction layer. Additional API integrations include Rightsline for license management and Google Maps for the site’s “Now Playing” feature, which shows geographic locations of current and upcoming performances for a particular play or musical.

Anything new: With each project, we continue to learn from and evolve our collaborative process. For Samuel French, members of our team attended Broadway shows to immerse themselves in the industry. Together, our teams went through many workshop-driven Concept Sprints to define the ideal state of the customer experience. The collaborative process included contexting meetings, requirements gathering, idea generation, prototyping and user testing with actual Samuel French customers.