We built a virtual showroom on Shopify with $5k and a dream
By: Chelsea Fieldsend
Tags: Milan, AR, Luxury, Shopify, Fashion

BOYY Spring Summer 2021 Virtual Showroom

When the pandemic hit Milan, my team was in the 2nd week of a 3-week selling campaign for our Autumn-Winter collection. The showroom, in the Quadrilatero della moda (fashion district) had been reconfigured to present the collection beautifully. Lots of flowers. The expensive ones. Champagne. Additional staff to cater to the retail Buyers, who were usually exhausted from zipping around Milan trying to squeeze 10 appointments into a single day and air kissing each person they came in contact with (the horror!). Within hours, every appointment had been cancelled. Trips were cut short. No one knew how bad it was, or would get, and the safest course seemed to be to head home and hunker down. We, along with every other luxury brand, quickly rescheduled to Facetime appointments, done by iPhone, or as that embarrassing uncle might, by an awkwardly positioned iPad, held up with one hand while the other tried to detach a strap or open a zip as part of a demonstration. We made it through (somehow) and actually almost hit our sales target for that collection.

Fast forward a few months — pandemic is still a problem, but things were looking up as Milan headed into summer. Nevertheless, we wanted to be overly cautious and consider the worst case scenario going into our next showroom period in July. We had a plan. Which was…to move our showroom to Paris! Yes! The pandemic won’t affect French people in the same way, surely.

The reality became clear pretty quickly following that. There would be no physical showroom. We had to pivot things fully online. If you’re not in fashion, here are the cliff notes on how a seasonal calendar and buying work:

Multi-brand retailers (yes, the ones you shop at) buy either directly from brands / manufacturers, or from agents representing those brands at wholesale price. Or sometimes, from third parties, which can be authorized or sketchy.

This ‘buying’ typically happens 4 times a year: in early fall, in early winter, in mid winter, and in the summer.

Deliveries come 6 months after the buy. So if the early fall buy happens in September, the product is delivered somewhere around February / March (which we call the Spring / Summer collection, go figure!).

Back to our story though (maybe I’ll do a follow up on how wholesale works in the luxury space and how it’s changing as brands go DTC and you can literally buy things from video games?). We had no plan to shift this very physical experience online with such a short turnaround time. Luckily, we imagined there MUST be other people out there who had already thought of this. And yay, there were. There were several platforms marketing themselves as ‘digital showroom providers’ and we were thrilled to fill our next week with demos. I am not going to go into the merits and shortfalls of these platforms, but what became clear very quickly was that they were, for the most part, operational. They were designed for efficiency, to prevent human error in order entry, to streamline PO generation, processing, communication with vendors and reporting. Which are all very, very important. But not what we needed. We needed A VIRTUAL SHOWROOM. And therein was the challenge (we are getting to the Shopify part, I promise). How do you present a luxury product virtually? We’re not talking about one person at home, who has already showroomed (for lack of a better term) by going into a flagship or retailer to see a bag, touch it, feel its weight and the grain of its leather, and then finally pulls the trigger at home, after weeks or months or contemplation. We are talking about someone that needs to spend $50k in about 45 minutes, sight unseen. You try it.

When my CEO suggested we just do it ourselves, I laughed a little too hard before realizing he was serious. And I honestly credit him for having the vision to cut through the pretty packaging of the available commercial platforms, and see that at the core, what we needed was not actually that complicated. Here’s what we did.

We’re on Shopify Plus, which comes with 10 ‘free’ expansion shops. Great. Use one of those. Password protect it so that your unreleased collection designs are not publicly accessible to every feral counterfeiter on the internet. IP lawyers happy with this approach. Good. Design a PLP (product listing page) that shows the whole collection on one page. Buyers are busy. They don’t have time to be clicking into collections, navigating back and forth, missing things, flipping pages. One. Page. Add some left hand nav so they don’t totally lose their minds. Product descriptions, and materials and measurements are obviously important. But pictures are WAY MORE important. On model for accessories to show the scale of the bag. Or shoot it next to a pomegranate or something. Show scale. Offer a zoom view. Especially in luxury, details are important. The stitching. The colour of the stitching. The patina of the distressed metal hardware. Whatever it is, there is someone who will want to zoom in, and that zoom better be high res or you might as well quit. Wishlist-type function (we actually used the same wishlist app we use on our regular site) so that Buyers can save their selection in advance of their appointment, and we can see it on the back end. Nice hero module. It’s still fashion. The cover matters. Upload as you would normally, and go.

We were able to pull this together with the support of a single developer and one mock-up in about a week. At the same time, we decided that AR actually sounded REALLY interesting for our purposes — showcasing something virtually that is impossible to present in person. And serendipitously, we knew a guy who knew a guy. We tapped an AR development company in Chicago to produce a selection of our bags that we included in the product details on our portal. You can see one here, if you’re curious (mobile will give you the full experience). This part took longer than a week. But the great thing is that we now have the models of these virtual assets, and we can play with materials, sizing, and colours going forward. We won’t have to start from scratch again. Besides that, we’re about to implement them on our commercial site. Win-win.

The feedback on our virtual showroom has been overwhelmingly positive. What I learned from the experience of developing it out of necessity is that scrappy doesn’t mean compromising on what’s fundamentally important. It just means you have to be better at identifying those things, and zero in on them quickly. Sign off on your design early and hold your developer to it. Don’t make things overly complicated. And we’ll all get through this, until we can air kiss and drink champagne together again.