Luxury intimate apparel company La Perla Fashions Inc. recently launched a new global e-commerce site on the CTS/SELL platform from Createthe Group.
La Perla hopes to both acquire new customers and retain existing ones with the revamp. One of its goals is to seamlessly integrate the brand and shopping experience, said James Gardner, CEO and founder of Createthe Group, which is La Perla’s interactive agency.
“One of the fairly common challenges facing brands with the previous generation of e-commerce sites is that the brand and shopping experiences are two separate experiences,” he said.
Another goal was to be able to provide the same online experience for customers on a global basis. To accomplish this, La Perla consolidated multiple e-commerce platforms across different countries into one global agreement for Createthe Group’s CTS/SELL platform, which has multilanguage and multicurrency capabilities. The new site supports 26 countries, six languages and three currencies.
The site soft-launched two weeks ago. Promotion is ramping up now via social outreach on Twitter and other social media channels.
Visitors to the site are immediately presented with high impact imagery from La Perla’s fashion campaigns “just as if you’re walking into a boutique,” said Gardner.
Shoppers can continue to review campaign images or click through from these images to product detail pages.
“This is a different way visually to explore, allowing users to shop directly from campaign imagery,” said Gardner. The goal is to create more of an emotional connection with visitors by making the brand feel very integrated with commerce, he continued.
The site also features oversized product images with multiple views and zoom to help convey the details in La Perla products and is integrated with the brand’s retail systems for real-time stock updates.
La Perla will showcase new offerings on the site, including a new bridal line, and will use the site to introduce its men’s line to the US. The line is already in Europe.
“It is no longer sufficient for brands to have a generic site that looks like any other brand,” said Gardner. Being able to integrate brand and commerce “is an absolute part of success online now,” he explained.
La Perla did not return a request for comment by press time.
A number of retailers have revamped their e-commerce efforts recently. Columbia Sportswear launched its new site in August, while Wrangler launched e-commerce for the first time the following month.
