What you need to know:

• Commbank-backed retailer competing with likes of Kogan, Ebay and Amazon and bidding to scale through better UX/CX – and exposure to CBA's 15m business and retail banking customers.
• Hardhat onboard as creative agency.

Little Birdie, the pure-play e-commerce retailer backed by a $30m Commbank investment has appointed Melbourne-based Hardhat as creative agency and redesigned its website in a bid to capitalise on the post-Covid Christmas boom.

The firm has also launched a new brand identity.

In May this year Commbank invested in Little Birdie pre-launch as it bids to build a major ecosystem of adjacent services within the banking app – and compete with global tech players. The aim is to understand more about customers preferences and habits, build out a bigger consented first party data trove, and give customers better value and experiences while saving them money.

Investing in Little Birdie ultimately puts the bank in competition with Australia’s other retailer marketplaces – such as Amazon, Ebay, Woolworths and Kogan – and the shopping platform is now bidding to scale, aided by exposure to Commbank's 15m business and retail banking customers.

The refreshed website is intended to provide customers with literally a bird’s eye view of the best deals across categories and brands, highlighting ‘top 50’ best deals on a daily basis.

Hardhat picked up the creative account after a pitch but the new website was designed by Symplicit, alongside Little Birdie’s in-house team, which also oversees UX.

Little Birdie CMO David Jennings said the platform’s aim is to give shoppers “The ability to fly above the congestion and swoop on the very best of Australian retail daily.”

Hardhat co-founder and Strategy Director, Dan Monheit added: “Somewhere along the way, the thrill of online shopping has been replaced by the anxiety of a thousand tabs. Little Birdie is the perfect solve and we’re excited to help take it to the world.”

Last week Commbank added to its shopper portfolio by taking a 20 per cent stake in gifting platform Karta. The bank hinted that more retail deals are on the way. Meanwhile, it is set to launch direct-to-consumer mortgage platform Unloan in the coming weeks.

Commbank today also announced a launch into crytpocurrency, partnering with an exchange and wallet provider to enable banking customers to trade and store currencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum from within the Commbank app.