Fashion e-commerce, branding vs conversion? Decoded Fashion London 2015

Survival of the fittest!
FASHION E-COMMERCE: CONVERSION VS. BRANDING?

2
In fashion, perhaps more than anywhere else, branding is everything.
Many fashion brands have spent decades building up a unique but
delicate brand image: they often rely on staying enigmatic, using
aspirational photography and inspired physical stores to differentiate.
In an increasingly online world, this imposes a problem. Success in e-
commerce is determined by laws of conversion, use of conventions and
by enabling choice. Not by exceeding expectations and offering
serendipity. This is why all profitable online fashion stores look more
and more the same.
In this talk, Pieter Jongerius will bring together the worlds of fashion,
touchpoint strategy and e-commerce design. After this talk, you will
have learnt a very concrete approach to obtaining success in fashion e-
commerce, illustrated with recent best practices.
@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF

3@FABRIQUE @PIETERJ #DFLONDON
Fabrique [brands, design & interaction], Delft Office

LONDON

@FABRIQUE @PIETERJ #DFLONDON 5
Conversion and branding go hand in hand
Our challenge
Model
Three areas of interest

Brand driven design

I often compare the challenge that our clients have with that of birds of paradise.
They have to comply to a lot of things, like having wings and little legs.
But they also have the need to find ways to stand out and create a difference between themselves and their competitors

8
Increasingly, patterns seem to be
the enemy of creativity and innovation.
@FABRIQUE @PIETERJ #DFLONDON

Lands’ end 2009: Wonderful shopping and exploration island,
with nice and big photography

And why?
We can finally measure the rude and impatient behaviour of our customers.

1
second delay in page response
7% cut in conversions
11% decline in page views
16% deduction in customer satisfaction

Conversion is king.

ON CONVERSION
The King, disected

Consider this car, and how we always complain that all cars increasingly look the same.
Causes for this are the forces of nature, Wind, gravity, but also legislation. In our case: brain capacity.
Creating overview, estimation of goal achievement, etc. …And there’s another reason.

The power of convention.
Even though you’ve probably never driven this exact type of car, because of convention you probably will be able to.

Conversion is convention.
…boring?

Back to the first car.
Who knows what type of car this is? How did you see? Yes, the tail light.
THAT is the place where the car designers found room to differentiate.

?
So if birds and cars have found their places of freedom as well as their constraints,
how does that work with fashion web shops?
And we’ll go into that.

Branding is creating a difference
…not boring!

ON BRANDING
What is a brand anyway?

appearance
communication
behavior
brand
personality
Birkigt&Stadler, 1986
You really have to understand who your brand is.
It’s great to actually have a human personality at the center of this.

Aaker (1987) has created a map of personality characteristics. With these, we might describe Karl as being
original yet sentimental, cool yet imaginative, intelligent yet charming.

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Personality inspires!

appearance
product information
trust & reassurance
SEO
UI patterns
grids
product photography
web-safe fonts
the “fold”
devices
communication
behavior
brand
personality
assortment
price & promotions
conditions
mobile
e-mail
facebook
new arrivals
mail & social
sale
However, we still have all these constraints that are so common to ecommerce.

appearance
product information
trust & reassurance
SEO
UI patterns
grids
product photography
web-safe fonts
the “fold”
devices
communication
behavior
brand
personality
assortment
price & promotions
conditions
mobile
e-mail
facebook
new arrivals
mail & social
sale
But there is room beyond all of these!!
We’ll now go through these three dimensions, one by one.

appearance
communication
behavior
brand
personality
?

Story telling

Luxury brands have a strong tradition in telling compelling stories. However, most have yet to learn to effectively do this online.
If I get to choose ‘The World of Versace’ on the left, then apparently ‘Shopping online’ is not part of that world… :-(

A great example is Zady, who have a strong e-commerce proposition,
while still telling stories of heritage, enterpreneurial values and craftsmanship.

Persuasive design

41@FABRIQUE @PIETERJ #DFLONDON A nice concept by three-fifty

Notice the SOLD signs? They communicate scarcity.
However, use with care: prevent me from thinking all the good ones have gone!

?
appearance
communication
behavior
brand
personality
Behavior is the most exciting one by far,
Because it’s all about innovation.

Only dead fish go with the flow.
Innovate or die.

46
BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
Commerce
Advice
Relation
Community
Emotion
These areas we defined together with a large Dutch retailer.
We’ll briefly go through them.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
What you sell determines not only your business but
also many other factors, such as how you look.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
Use the properties of your collection to create
something unique, Greats Brand shoes do that.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
Providing advice or inspiration can be at the core of
your brand and positioning. Just look at net-a-porter,
with their online and print magazines.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
…or J-Crew, with their great editorial news letters.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
If you have a unique way or see a chance of providing
advice, this is an excellent way to differentiate.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
The UK startup Brandit is a great example.
(sadly, their service recently went offline)

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
They had an on-boarding process called MALE

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
After registering, there was no shop.
Just a chat engine in which you could ask your
question.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
When waking in the city, your phone buzzed and your
personal shopper would come back to you with a
suggestion.
So why aren’t they there anymore? Perhaps they broke
one or two conventions too many…

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
A couple of years ago, we all thought the world would
move into profiling and customization.
It may still happen, but right now I see a movement
towards human interaction and relation.
The Outfittery and the Cloakroom are examples.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
Every brand brings people together. You may choose
to make this central to how your brand ‘works’.
Look at Crowdemand, a platform that gives young
designers a boost, powered by community pre-orders.

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
Finally, as a brand, you might aim to elicit emotions
and create associations based on that.
Like Uniqlo. They have a strong history of lifestyle
apps that underline the brand

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
Such as the wakeup app, that actually wakes you up by
singing the weather for you

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
…the gorgeous calendar app…

·  Commerce
·  Advice
·  Relation
·  Community
·  Emotion
…and more recently, their Lifewear cooking app,
pairing food with music and fashion.

64
Commerce
Advice
Relation
Community
Emotion

?
appearance
communication
behavior
brand
personality
Next: appearance
This is where branding-oriented merchants and designers alike are skidding off the track by the dozens.

·  Main navigation
·  Basket top-right
·  Scannable and scrollable
PLP
·  Filters left,
maybe top
·  Clean PDP layout
·  Size guides &
measurements
·  The “fold”
·  ..the buttons.
DON’T MESS WITH…
Get creative?
Watch out, dont mess with things like these.
May seem trivial but I see so many shops violating this!

67@FABRIQUE @PIETERJ #DFLONDON it is however all about adopting your own color.

Some examples from our work

Designers Victor & Rolf, being a bit perky, decided to ignore all conventions and wanted us to create a round website.
But then again, they’re not selling anything :)

New Belgium womens fashion brand that we helped develop.

Almost slow-fashion, core values of the brand are honesty, modesty and authenticity.

This was reflected an a very understated and basic graphical design, with honest full-screen photography.

Dutch/European fashion retailer

When we were asked to create the design for their web store, all the briefing we got was: go visit our store.
That’s what we want to see online.

independent,
daring,
down-to-earth
In a couple of workshops, we formalized their brand, with these core values

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This is the homepage. It was one of our earliest sketches and they wanted it quite badly, even though it went against all rules and conventions for a homepage.
Actually it worked very well and had a very low bounce rate.
However after a year, we all got a bit tired of it, so now it’s been replaced anyway.

Beyond that, our client wanted a bright shop that looked dark.
Because it is urban myth that bright shops convert better than dark shops.
So we worked very hard with lighting…

The French 3Suisses has been around for decades. They’ve asked us to redo their visual identity and help them revive their brand.

We’ve created a ‘magalogue’, a magazine/catalogue crossover.

The ipad app was created to be a bit daring, by offering mix and match offering, based on your mood and style

Online photography was kept quite accessible

…and the web store conforms to all (well, most) rules of conversion.

This approach, together with the hard work of many 3Suisses people, earned us third place in the international fashion e-commerce field on the French market.

Mallett, London and NY based, one of the world foremost Antiques dealer.
They performed a major market innovation: selling online.

Mix of traditional values and the oppenness required by today’s ecommerce.
In short, we had to create “a museum where you can buy things”.

Having done a lot of work in the area of heritage, this was a home match in more than one way.

To underline accessablity, we designed the shop tablet first.
Large scale controls, very little on the screen at a single time.

This is about as far as we’d go in deviating from conventional interface patterns.

But… can you go overboard?

Absolutely.
How much does this product cost? How do you select a size?

Even big brands like Calvin Klein have a hard time balancing branding and conversion.

This plethora of boxes is almost impossible to use.
I’m pretty sure conversion for this site was quite low: since recently, this part of their site was demoted to a corner of their navigation structure.

appearance
communication
behavior
brand
personality
✓
✓
✓

:)
appearance
communication
behavior
brand
personality

104
The classic dilemma, at an interface level

So what if you know a four-column list page will convert better, but you think 3 colums look better?

What if your designer comes up with an innovative way to turn products,
but you fear that some customers will not understand?

A/B tests.
which test won.com
What if you know conversion will
increase if you show a mailing list
lightbox, but you really hate them
yourself?
Then you do AB tests! Most ecommerce
managers report that they’re not doing
them, or not enough.
Go, people!

And what about…

Video is just for fans
… awesome brand video’s? Research that the Dutch research agency Netmarketing did shows:
Only fans will enjoy them. As long as they’re placed outside of the essential click paths, they won’t hurt other users.
Until now, we could measure no positive effect on conversion, but it may be there for fans.

and other traditional “branding” and “inspirational” content?

112
20% / +20%
“Inspiration”
Sadly, evidence shows that only 1 out of 5 people are actually interested in them…

113
20% / +20%
basket size
“Inspiration”
However, after looking at it, they spend 20% more! That’s actually great news :)

SO…

DARE TO DIFFER UNDERSTAND TONE OF VOICE INNOVATE
LOOK DIFFERENT INSPIRE (A BIT) NO DILEMMAS SURVIVE & THRIVE
To sum it up, these are the 8 things you need to know and do to become succesful AND be different online.
I hope this talk will help you find the competitive edge that really fits YOU.

116@FABRIQUE @PIETERJ #DFLONDONAll in all, this is a plea to stick to conventions where needed, but break the mold on all other area’s! Be different, your survival depends on it.

all content copyright of their respective owners
Want to know more?
•  Call Pieter at +31-654-787-664
•  Mail: pieter (at) fabrique.nl
•  Check http://fabrique.nl/en/fashion

Fashion e-commerce, branding vs conversion? Decoded Fashion London 2015

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