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 Other Media to build the company’s first online store in 2004, plus the US store. This has since evolved into a redesign for 2010. Other Media enjoyed a long-term relationship with Paul Smith, prestigious British fashion retailer, that comprised of Online Strategy, Web Design and Build, Ecommerce, SEO, Online Marketing.

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. The 2004 store was beginning to reach the end of its natural life. We were commissioned to launch a major redesign in 2009. Paul Smith 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 fulfilment. Further designs were required for the important Japanese store.

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 recognisable 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. Whilst critical as a retail website, the site 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. Designs were subsequently recrafted for the Japanese website using the route set in the UK (rest of world) website.

The results

The site has proven to be highly successful both in terms of beautifully representing the Paul Smith brand and producing amazing commercial results: with the number of daily quality visitors increasing by 27% between 2009 and 2010 . Average order value has increased, with May 2010 being up 22% year on year. The ROI for the site, based on build costs to revenue, is a massive 8696 per cent.