Luxury brand Paul Smith has refreshed its digital commerce experience, improving online conversions and boosting revenue through its partnership with Klevu and Limesharp.
For over 50 years, Paul Smith has celebrated independent design, championing positivity, curiosity and creativity. What began in a small, 3 x 3 metre shop in Nottingham, England, has grown to 130 shops and counting around the world, with locations in over 60 countries. Remaining true to the legacy of the brand, Paul Smith ecompasses fashion, art, and fun, placing customer experience at the centre of everything it does. However, its legacy platform meant Paul Smith couldn’t provide the digital experience that truly represented the brand.
Hannah Bennett, Head of Digital at Paul Smith, said: “As a fashion brand with fantastic shops, each very unique and well designed, I was frustrated at our fixed/limited monolith front end – the website you visited didn’t represent our infamous Pink Wall shop in LA, or our flagship in Ginza or Paul’s local Albemarle in Mayfair. I wanted the website to be a Digital Flagship that was fast, designed for us and our product and customers, so we could always be best in practice, not hindered by technology.”
The brand began the process by installing Klevu on the existing monolithic frontend, before the larger replatforming project started. This allowed Paul Smith to lean on Klevu AI to maximise conversion and revenue during the transformation.
Integrating Klevu search, and category merchandising software from the product discovery platform has enabled Paul Smith to serve up more accurate results to shoppers faster than ever before. In just an 8-week period, Paul Smith saw revenue from search up by 74%, ecommerce conversion rate up by 31% and per session value up by 26%. Klevu AI automatically provides insights into real-time shopper behaviour, which in turn amends the order of the products and content to maximise conversions and revenue.
Bennett continued: “A lot of other companies we have either used or considered for merchandising were too singing and dancing. We were given all these options, and the reality is we’re a brand. We need to be telling customers what’s hot right now, and what they should be looking at. So we wanted something that we could plug in and just leave to tick over, like Klevu. Now, we will pin key products that we feel need to be highlighted, or easily switch product ordering to favour high stock items when we are in sale mode. Other than that we let Klevu AI run in the background and it works.”
Klevu’s category merchandising solution has seen conversion rates increase by 34%, per session value boosted by 20% for men’s category pages and conversion rates up 49%, whilst per session value has increased 15% on women’s category pages.
Alongside Klevu, Limesharp was chosen to rebuild Paul Smith’s ecommerce platform on a composable ecommerce architecture to suit the needs of the business.
Ed Bull, founder of Limesharp said: “Through our discovery process with Paul Smith we found brand content that was tucked away in the blog containing incredible product information. This was particularly prevalent with the many collaborations that took place over the 50 years of Paul Smith. This formed part of our objectives…how can we bring that rich content to shoppers focussed on product discovery? When you search for a collaboration on the site now, like Manchester United or Cycling, the stories are showcased with the product which is really powerful.”
The design agency utilised Klevu’s solutions to allow Paul Smith to visually show relevant stories, relating to products, for the curious customer. The headless technology approach means that Limesharp could create a very unique design, leaning on Klevu’s API’s to fetch the data needed.
Nilay Oza, CEO and Co-Founder at Klevu, commented: “The Paul Smith team has learned to trust Klevu AI to deliver the right product and content results to shoppers, manually merchandising as lightly as possible. This balance of AI automation and strategic control through the easy-to-use admin panel has empowered Paul Smith’s ecommerce team to be efficient and high-performing – resulting in higher conversion rates, greater sales figures, and improved customer satisfaction. I can say on behalf of the entire Klevu team, we are overjoyed with the results that Paul Smith has seen. We’re honoured to be working with such an iconic brand.”
