Modernising a heritage brand through web and brand transformation

Branding
Web design & development
CRM & payments
Paid media & email
Hosting & support

Rebuilding the digital engine of a 100-year institution, and tracing an estimated £275k of course revenue to the forms we built

Gem-A (The Gemmological Association of Great Britain) is the world's longest-established provider of gemmology education. Its Gemmology Diploma traces back to the first gem course proposed for the UK jewellery trade in 1908, and today Gem-A teaches through its London headquarters, online distance learning and more than 40 accredited teaching centres, with a global community spanning 26+ countries.

Gem-A came to us with a dual challenge: redesign an ageing website and revitalise a decades-old brand, without losing the heritage that defines it. Three years on, we're its digital partner, running the platforms and channels that bring in students and members.

“Working with Darwin was a great experience. Communication was clear and consistent, and we always felt listened to. We’re pleased with the final outcome and continue to work with Darwin today.”

Geo Thomas, Education Lead, Gem-A

Challenge

Gem-A's website, built on Joomla, was dated, cluttered and nearing end of life. It didn't reflect the prestige of the organisation, it was hard for visitors to find answers and hard for staff to manage, and it was only loosely connected to Gem-A's membership CRM.

The brand needed a refresh that would feel modern while keeping the classic crest and sense of tradition members valued. And behind the scenes, the organisation needed dependable support across several sites, payment systems and a closed CRM, through inevitable changes of staff.

Solution

We began with stakeholder workshops, then reimagined the brand, preserving the crest while introducing modern typography, cleaner layouts and updated guidelines. We rebuilt gem-a.com on WordPress with a cleaner UX, future-proof code and far closer integration with the Oomi CRM, keeping the old site live through Joomla 3's end of support so the switchover cost no downtime.

From there, the relationship grew into an annual retainer:

Hosting and support for four sites: Gem-A, Gem-A Instruments, GemIntro UK and GemIntro China, with ticketed support, security and uptime monitoring
Payments and CRM: keeping membership payments flowing, including a custom bridge when PayPal's legacy notifications failed, and syncing CRM data to Mailchimp, unlocking 1,000+ tags for segmentation
A lead engine: a Register Interest form on every channel, Mailchimp nurture emails and a Google Ads campaign returning an estimated 6.6x on ad spend
Strategy and insight: a marketing audit against global peers, lead analysis that traces revenue to each channel and reporting the board can actually read

When a third-party DNS transfer knocked the site offline, we traced the cause across providers and had Gem-A back online within hours. We've also written full API documentation and set up 2FA so the in-house team can do more themselves: support hours have fallen by a third since our first year.

The result

In ten months, the website forms took 2,070 enquiries from 1,447 people, leading to an estimated 140 new customers and around £275k of course revenue. Google, paid and organic together, drove 69% of student sign-ups, with leads arriving daily from the UK, the Gulf, Canada, France, Brazil and beyond. Course uptake rose 60% on the previous year. Gem-A went from struggling to fill courses to running a waitlist, and the pipeline belongs to Gem-A, not a third-party platform.