Topshop.com
The brief:
Help Topshop translate the experience and commercial prowess of their Oxford Street Store online as they shifted on to a beast of an ecommerce platform.
Poke’s answer:
A site that fostered the marriage of ordered, dense, highly functional product pages with a rich editorial and inspirational layer both on site and distributed through feeds, podcasts, Facebook apps and beyond.
Nitty gritty
We had to pummel IBM’s Web Sphere platform to not kill every ounce of Topshop personality when designing the core commerce system. Every page and feature was pushed and adapted to breath life and personality into the system’s dry, mechanical structure.
We created a custom CMS on top of WS to deliver the blog, rss feed and rich editorial to the site. This layer allowed constant remixing of inventory and gave another reason to stop by (just like shop windows really). All of this deep-linked into product sales pages; something that has since become the standard approach in online fashion retailing.
Customer ‘addiction’ was fed with the blog and associated feeds for more general inspiration and a second product-only blog (‘The Fix’) that spat out a curated feed that often led to items selling out in minutes.
The product feed connected to a Facebook app that allowed friends to like and share new products as they entered the feed. This app pre-dated the ‘like’ function of facebook but was effectively the same thing. These days the Topshop team just put new items into their feed and people can “like” them. (Things do get easier over time).
A podcast was designed and a simple publishing tool was constructed and managed into the Topshop internal content team who then released weekly podcast updates featuring new product (linked back to store through product codes).
In fact we did such a good job empowering the Topshop team that they don’t hire us any more, they just get on with it themselves. But we’re still very proud of having helped it all off in the right direction.
Highlights
- Working with a client team that just got it, supported a radical vision and got on with it.
- Being the first high street retailer to attack social media in a sophisticated and integrated way and having a lot of fun in the process.
- Launching the Kate Moss collection and helping to establish credibility that allowed her to go on to produce several hugely successful collections.
- Bringing the mighty Matt Treagus into Arcadia to make some very difficult and necessary things happen behind the corporate scenes.
