For online fashion retailer Moda Operandi, imagery matters, especially when working closely with designers like Oscar de la Renta, Marc Jacobs and Diane Korbos to offer consumers access to ready-to-wear fashion, luxury leather goods and fine jewelry.
Moda Operandi makes this possible through its trunk shows and online boutique, both powered by its ecommerce site. The imagery however must capture everything – luxury, quality and vibrancy – and the image must load fast.
“Imagery is everything in selling our products because we work with luxury products in an online setting,” said Keiron McCammon, CTO of Moda Operandi. “Having high fidelity imagery is key to getting out of the way and letting the product sell itself.”
This was top of mind when the company decided to rebuild its platform in early 2014, McCammon said.
“The big driving part of that rebuild was about content and commerce blending together in a seamless experience,” he said. “We work with designers right off the runway and use imagery and storytelling to invoke the runway experience.”
More than 40% of customers access Moda Operandi through mobile devices and the company expects this number to increase. It was therefore critical that the site work well across all devices with a minimal amount of manual resizing, panning and scrolling required.
“Having an image-intensive image experience and translating that to a mobile platform is not easy,” said McCammon. “We were able to leverage Instart Logic to optimize the delivery of that visual content, optimized to the device.”
Moda Operandi was able to overhaul the entire user experience to including fast image load times that immerse the user in the product through Instart Logic’s web performance suite and foundation services. Applications are sent in small pieces rather than large downloads, and images and file sizes are adapted automatically for the right device type with machine learning and computer vision technology.
With the help of Instart Logic’s software-defined application delivery solution, Moda Operandi’s new site was launched in April, offering an immersive, luxury showroom experience.
“Instart Logic has a unique approach to content delivery, which puts the smarts on the content side,” said McCammon. “This made it seamless for our developers as they planned and rolled out our new platform.”
Customers can browse designer’s trunk shows to pre-order next season’s fashions, shoes, accessories, handbags and jewelry. They can also visit the online boutique to shop for current, in-season products.
Partnering with Instart Logic provided Moda Operandi with an innovative way to speed up web application delivery performance, ensuring the user doesn’t have to sit idle while waiting for the backend HTML to be generated.
Load times are now two to three seconds across the site, boosting overall web performance by up to 30%. This has enabled Moda Operandi to double the number of images on the site as planned and enhance the user experience without bogging down performance.
“Creating a great first load for consumers is exactly what we wanted to achieve,” said McCammon. “We’re going to continue to work on our backend configuration to find our sweet spot for optimal speed. Our goal is to have page load times around one second, and we believe that is achievable with Instart Logic.”