Multimap Announces Major Deal with Wella UK at Retail Solutions 2004, Birmingham

Multimap Press Release 08/06/04

Multimap.com, Europe's leading online mapping company, will announce the implementation of its online mapping services for Wella UK at The Retail Solutions Show in Birmingham on the 8th June, 2004.

The leading hairdressing manufacturer, which supplies 8,000 salons across the UK, has empowered users of its site, www.wella.co.uk, to find their nearest salon, see which Wella products it stocks, access a map of the surrounding area, and get point-to-point travel directions, by deploying Multimap’s services. NetInfo, the e-business consultancy, also worked with Wella to implement Multimap’s mapping services.

Visitors to www.wella.co.uk click on the ‘Salon Finder’ link on the left of the home page, and enter their street and town name and/or postcode; Multimap then delivers a list of the top ten nearest salons to the address entered, plus a map on which the locations of the salons are represented by icons. Users can pan N,S,E,W and zoom in/out to adjust their view. The list of salons that appears beneath the map provides salons’ address, telephone number and distance in miles from the location entered, plus links to a list of the products stocked, and step-by-step travel directions.

To receive the directions, customers next click on “Generate Route”. The directions appear as a numbered list, and a detailed map of each step is just a click away. Users can switch between the maps associated with each step in order, or go straight to the start or end map. A map showing the full route is also just a click away.

Willem Mijnarends, UK sales manager at Multimap, said, “We are very pleased to announce such an exciting deal at Retail Solutions today. By deploying Multimap’s online mapping services, the excellent customer care for which Wella UK is famous,is extended beyond customers’ experience in the salons to its web site presence. This is a vital part of keeping customers loyal and happy. It’s precisely for this reason that four out of five UK-based retailers have chosen to use our mapping services.”

Matt Martin, Wella UK, said, “We wanted to make our customers’ online experience as positive and useful as possible, leading to increased brand loyalty and site usage. The ultimate aim, of course, is to increase traffic volumes to our salons. We’ve already seen a very marked increase on all these fronts since deploying Multimap’s services.”

Multimap.com is Europe's leading provider of mapping and location-based services. The company delivers more online maps, point-to-point driving directions and geo-spatial ("where's my nearest?") searches to more companies than any other supplier in Europe. All services are offered on WAP, PDA, kiosk, and interactive TV platforms and in multiple languages.

The public web site www.multimap.com provides a range of free, useful services to assist with everyday life. Key features include street-level maps of Europe, USA, Canada and Australia; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; weather forecasts; links to location information; and services such as hotel, restaurant and entertainment booking. The public site attracts over 7.3 million unique users, registers more than 100 million page impressions every month, and is one of the top 10 most visited web sites in the UK. Multimap recently came 27th in The Sunday Times' Tech Track 100 league table of fastest-growing companies.

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