White Stuff Quickly Lifts Customer Experience with BigCommerce

Discover how customisable, cost-effective and reliable BigCommerce is and why we built it that way.

case-study-device-laptop-White-Stuff

37%

conversion rate increase

100%

speed boost on mobile

26%

per-session value increase

Performance metrics collected during the dual running period between the old and new platforms.

Dedicated to exploring, the White Stuff way.

As the name suggests, White Stuff started life on the ski slopes. Its founders were looking for a way to fund their obsession with skiing in the Alps and struck on the idea that selling t-shirts could provide an income and keep them on the slopes.

That was in 1985. The idea was so successful, the company launched its first shop, in London, within eight years. Since then, it has opened more than a hundred stores in the UK and Germany. Throughout this period of growth, the ethos of the brand has always remained the same — to keep on exploring.

CHALLENGE

Focussing on customer experience not legacy issues.

When White Stuff realised it was not a leading player in fashion ecommerce, it faced a simple question. Did it continue to be average or should it replatform to become a leader in the apparel sector?

The answer was obvious, but the way forward was less clear. It knew its customers wanted to interact with the brand digitally, as well as in bricks-and-mortar settings, particularly through their smartphones. The trouble was, the platform it was using was sluggish and inflexible, as Steve Borg, Technology and Transformation Director at White Stuff, explains.

“There was a great ambition and appetite at White Stuff to keep up with the pace of change in the fashion retail market, but we just didn't have the tools to do that,” he says.

“Speed performance was poor and our previous platform couldn’t scale well when we had busy periods. We were spending way too much of our time trying to sort out back-end processes around payment, compliance or whatever, rather than customer journey experience improving and building, which is really where we wanted to focus.”

“There was a great ambition and appetite at White Stuff to keep up with the pace of change in the fashion retail market, but we just didn't have the tools to do that.” 

Steve Borg Technology and Transformation Director, White Stuff

SOLUTION

Headless gives flexibility and speed.

Offering customers a better experience through performance improvements was the initial motivation factor that prompted White Stuff to replatform to BigCommerce. It knew speed and functionality were constrained by the technology it was using, so the solution was to separate the front- and back-ends by going headless.

“I was really adamant about the role of speed on the site because of the need with fashion retail to bring content to life through the increased use of video and rich imagery that a customer wants to experience our brand,” says Steve.

“So that really drove some decisions around a headless implementation. We felt that that was the best way to retain a lightweight front-end and give us the maximum chance of consistently being able to provide that fast experience for customers.”

This speed and increased flexibility was achieved through the decision to go headless which liberated White Stuff to work with the vendors who specialise in building the best tools for a particular function. 

The multiple benefits of a MACH and partner-first approach.

This MACH approach (Micro-services, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) meant the brand could integrate the solutions it felt were the best fit for its strategy, rather than accept a monolithic solution for all aspects of its ecommerce operation. 

After opting for BigCommerce as its central ecommerce platform, it worked with Apply Digital for implementation, Alokai [previously Vue Storefront] for its front-end, Amplience for content management, Akeneo for product information management and Constructor for search and product discovery. It also localised its website for a variety of markets with BigCommerce Multi-Storefront

This composable strategy, of integrating the best tools, allowed White Stuff to supplement its in-house professionals with a wider range of experienced partners who could work together to give the business the fast, slick site it required.  

“We have a relatively small team, and therefore we look for good partners,” Steve explains. “We’ve gone with a partner-first approach. Running a proof of concept with Amplience, Vue Storefront, and Constructor gave us the confidence that these solutions would work really well together, would give us the headless solution we were looking for to keep things lightweight, and would give us the ability to innovate quickly.”

Simple checkout, flexible collections.

White Stuff was very clear its focus was on customer experience. Rather than redesigning the site, the aim was to bring shoppers closer to the brand by removing any friction preventing them from finding the perfect items and ordering them.

The biggest boost to customer experience here was a shift from a three-page to one-page checkout. While White Stuff customers had not complained about its older, more cumbersome checkout process, the brand determined speeding up and simplifying the process would be a good move — and A/B testing proved the hunch was correct. 

Friction was not only removed at the payment stage, but also delivery. Rather than make customers choose between shopping in-store or online, White Stuff opted for an omnichannel approach using click and collect. 

“We're a pretty lightweight team and so we need to be agile to adapt to customer expectations, which are changing very quickly,” Steve Borg says. 

“What started off as a premium experience can become very normal very quickly. Click and collect was a small percentage of our business a few years ago but 20% of online orders are click and collect these days. So the expectation is that if you're a multichannel retailer, you need to execute click and collect very well.”

Content agility, the star of the online experience.

White Stuff’s previous platform not only gave its users a slow experience, it did the same for the company’s small ecommerce team. Content was difficult to find and repurpose on the retail site and creating digital marketing campaigns at speed was virtually impossible. 

Hence, the company knew that while customers needed a better experience, so too did its retail and marketing teams. This came through a new Content Management System (CMS), which allows for assets to be discovered and repurposed at breakneck speed.

“One of the major transformational parts of this project has been around content management,” says Steve Borg. 

“We were spending days or even weeks developing a new campaign or executing changes. With BigCommerce, we can now do this in hours or even minutes because we've got a content management solution and an ecommerce platform that seamlessly plug in together.”

Agency:

Highlighted applications:

Technical features:

BigCommerce Service:

  • Solution Architect

  • Implementation Project Manager

  • Customer Success Manager

“We were spending days or even weeks developing a new campaign or executing changes. With BigCommerce, we can now do this in hours or even minutes because we've got a content management solution and an ecommerce platform that seamlessly plug in together.”

Steve Borg Technology and Transformation Director, White Stuff

“We have a relatively small team, and therefore we look for good partners. We’ve gone with a partner-first approach. Running a proof of concept with Amplience, Vue Storefront, and Constructor gave us the confidence that these solutions would work really well together, would give us the headless solution we were looking for to keep things lightweight, and would give us the ability to innovate quickly.”

Steve Borg, Technology and Transformation Director, White Stuff

case-study-device-tablet-White-Stuff

RESULTS

Better performance and skyrocketing conversions.

Switching to the composable architecture had immediate benefits for the company’s ecommerce operations. In order to truly test the changes, White Stuff implemented the new site without making any changes to its design so that customers would not behave differently and the company could do a true like-for-like comparison.

White Stuff set out, first and foremost, to give its customers a much better experience. A cumbersome, slow site was 85% quicker overall during the dual running period between the old and new platforms. Crucially, it also became 100% faster on mobile phones. It is an important point because the majority of its customers choose to interact with the brand on a mobile phone.

At the same time, switching from a three-page to a one-page check-out has taken the friction out of purchasing, leading to an overall conversion rate improved 37% in the same period. Finally, the brand saw a 26% increase of the average transaction revenue for a session.

“I was really adamant about the role of speed on the site because of the need with fashion retail to bring content to life through the increased use of video and rich imagery that a customer wants to experience our brand.”

Steve Borg Technology and Transformation Director, White Stuff

LOOKING AHEAD

A flexible future for White Stuff.

If there is one word that sums up the future possibilities at White Stuff it is flexibility. The company was held back by an inflexible, sprawling set of tools which tied down far too much of its time, just trying to keep up. 

Now it has been released from those bonds and can plan a future for its ecommerce operations that is not held back by legacy systems that fail to perform and refuse to scale. 

“It’s flexibility that gives you future proofing,” he says. “If I were to give our entire technology strategy a single word, it would be flexibility. And that's what we're trying to build, and all CIOs are trying to build, providing the flexibility in your business so that the decisions you make can be enabled through your technology.”

“If I were to give our entire technology strategy a single word, it would be flexibility. And that's what we're trying to build, and all CIOs are trying to build, providing the flexibility in your business so that the decisions you make can be enabled through your technology.”

Steve Borg Technology and Transformation Director, White Stuff

Published: June 2024

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