The Sainsbury Archive

Sainsbury’s Archive was created in 1969 to celebrate the first 100 years of the supermarket. It is now one of the oldest business archives in the UK, holding not only a history of the Sainsbury supermarket brand but also a unique record of the transformation in retailing and the impact that these changes have had on society.

In 2017, Keepthinking embarked on an exciting journey with the Sainsbury Archive: to produce a website to showcase the archive collection and history all in one place. It was launched in time for the 150th anniversary of the first store opening its doors.

The website aims to tell 150 years of supermarket history and deliver it to multiple audiences in different ways and depths, by layering information. It seeks to engage and involve audiences in the stories told, with importance placed on the ways people would interact and feel ownership of the content, adding a level of personalisation.

User research guided us in creating multiple entry points to the various sections, including a key events timeline, key persons in the company history, a historical map of branches, and the archive catalogue. Each section is visually connected to others, and led by archival imagery. Curated highlights and an extensive, flexible search enables access to the archival collection in a variety of intuitive ways, catering to the different user profiles.

The archive's online content had previously been separated into four different websites. This disparate spread looked outdated and lacked a relationship across the types of content.

Therefore, Keepthinking was commissioned to design and develop a new website to unify this exciting and interesting content into one intuitive, responsive website.

The main goal was to fuse these four into a resource that would be used by all existing users and more; cross-referencing between the kinds of content and displaying it in a new accessible interface with the functionality to encourage browsing, discovery, sharing, and involvement from the visitor. It was important that the website be usable and exciting to the visitor.

Map of all the physical locations of Sainsbury stores, warehouses, offices and farms, which are spread all over the country. The expansion and spread can be explored through an animation, and a user can also search the map for any store or location that might interest them.

A hierarchical structure and timeline filter present the user with key milestones of the supermarket’s history, connecting events (such as supermarket location openings and catalogue issues) with archival material (such as packaging and uniforms); allowing for serendipitous discovery to take place with the user in control of what they want to view.

Records display key information, their location in the archive hierarchy tree and large scale images at a glance with the option to reveal more details upon user interaction. Users are able to zoom into images and rotate them.

There are multiple ways in which users can engage with the content, and create a sense of community. This includes gathering archive material into their own albums, comments, social media sharing as well as sharing personal stories (memories) related to branches or specific archival material.

The Sainsbury Archive is currently undergoing a vast cataloguing project for their images and catalogue data and the new website will support it by making this material available to the public.

Keepthinking delivered a user-friendly website with a wide range of exciting content for the visitor to explore and interact with. Google analytics: From website launch to the end of 2018 (6 months), there were 16,746 unique users with 153,600 page views.

For the equivalent period in 2017, the four old sites had 2,353 unique users with 7,829 page views. User engagement: Since the launch of the website, there have been over 100 memories added to the website (of which 80 are online), and over 1100 people have signed up to be users. There have also been over 150 user albums created.

Feedback and internal company use of the website: the archive team has received a lot of positive feedback from various different audiences, including not only the staff veterans (there have been personal calls from several expressing their happiness at the material being available), but also from archivists as a whole, who are expressing how easy it is to use the site and how fantastic it is to see the range of material on offer in such a medium.