Building a striking and user-friendly ecommerce website for British designer, Paul Smith; able to encapsulate the company’s strong offline identity.
Introducing Paul Smith
Iconic fashion designer Paul Smith founded his first store in 1970; today his 12 collections are wholesaled to 35 countries. The Paul Smith brand combines a genuine sense of humour and mischief; with a love of tradition and the classics. Paul Smith selected the OTHER media to build the company’s first online store in 2004, since then we’ve carried out one major redesign and built US and Japanese stores for Paul Smith
The challenge
The Paul Smith brand is extremely well known and recognisable offline, thus the new website had to reinforce and further this brand experience online. Paul Smith also wanted to see a significant return on investment (ROI); higher average order values (AOV) and tidy integration with the company's business processes and back end systems, to ensure efficiency in fulfillment.
What we did
We worked collaboratively with Paul Smith’s in-house design team to forge an on-brand design route for the website, based on recognizable brand accents and assets. The site had to create a tangible experience around the brand; with magazine style content about Paul Smith; his ideas and inspirations; collaborations and collections. This website is much more than a selling tool.
We built Paul Smith’s website using OTHERobjects CMS with the OTHERcommerce extension. This gives the Paul Smith team full control over specific customer experience and has allowed us to add additional features, including telephone ordering and order management.
The results
The site has proven to be highly successful: with the number of daily visitors increasing by an average of 2,500 visitors per day, between June 2007 and June 2008. Average order value has also increased, with May 2008 being up 20 per cent on May 2007. The ROI for the site, based on build costs to revenue, is a massive 8696 per cent.