'Edition' by the iconic: Content that converts
THE ICONIC is Australia and New Zealand’s favourite online retail destination, but how do they inspire and entertain customers when they’re not in a purchase frame of mind?
OVERVIEW
THE ICONIC needed a better place to tell the stories of their brands, outside of the vast and sometimes seemingly impenetrable catalogue. With access to internal studios and the quick production of content, THE ICONIC needed a place to showcase this plethora of images and stories and deepen customer connection.
RESULTS
Built in 3 WeeksReclaimed Roi Within 3 Months of Launch3 Million Users Per Month
Deepen the connection with THE ICONIC’s customers by providing industry-leading editorial and content even when they’re not actively shopping online.
Challenge
We wanted to build a new fashion and style advice blog, auxiliary to THE ICONIC main site, where the information is accessible across a wide range of channels, platforms and eventually would integrate into THE ICONIC app and site itself.
We knew the environment needed to be flexible for editors to create a variety of article types with ease, but we needed to do this in a lean MVP - all within 4 weeks so our budget didn’t disappear with the new fiscal year.
The challenge also lay in the fact we would need to combine THE ICONIC's (immense amount) of product data with the inspirational fashion content the editors are tirelessly creating.
A development spike was the best approach in order to prove proof of concept.
Solution
In a true ‘test and learn’ approach, ‘Edition’, THE ICONIC’s newest home of fashion, style and beauty advice, was born in just three weeks as a lean MVP.
We identified that Prismic, a headless CMS solution, would give us both the content flexibility we needed and the agility to iterate.
Utilising a headless CMS, we provided the editorial team the ability to create rich layouts for their stories, while also starting on a platform which would be scalable for the future - we wouldn’t be wedded to a limiting template-driven CMS.
We gave the content editors full flexibility to tell their stories with rich layouts, using our ‘Lego blocks’ component-driven approach within the Prismic CMS.
We utilised React on the front end, and a small NodeJS service that communicates/caches data from the headless CMS API. We created the Node service so it would be able to integrate with THE ICONIC API to marry up both content and product data - this true merging of product and content give the user a seamless way to interact with (and purchase from) the catalogue when they’ve just seen or read something on Edition that has inspired them.
The creation of a chatbot to push Edition content out also allowed shoppers to personalise their preferences and have a weekly edit of content delivered via Facebook Messenger, at a time of their choosing. The bot was also configured with a smart search, even just using the 👖 emoji would provide the user with articles featuring 'denim'. A seamless handover protocol allowed users to jump from inspirational content, to customer service, all within the same chat history.
A true merging of product and content, readers of Edition articles are then able to tap an image that piques their interest and either favourite the item or add directly to their cart.
The headless solution has allowed us to open new channels and opportunities, such as Chatbot integrations and media micro-services. Continuing growth of the platform has pushed re-investment into new features. The Edition now sees upwards of 3 million users a month with no slowing in sight.
The success of Edition can be put down to a close collaboration with Nightjar and THE ICONIC and their tech, product, marketing and content teams, sprinting together to make a tight deadline with a brand new solution we had not even at first thought possible.
