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White Stuff Transforms the Online Experience with a “Partner-First Approach” to Ecommerce

+21 %
search conversion rate
Industry
Apparel and Home
Headquarters
London, United Kingdom
Solutions
Search, Browse, Recommendations, Collections
+21 %
search conversion rate
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The Brand

About White Stuff

Founded in 1985 as a small T-shirt business to fund ski trips to the French Alps, White Stuff has grown into what is today an iconic apparel brand in the United Kingdom and EU.

 Built on pillars of originality, sustainability, and quality, the brand boasts more than 120 retail stores across Europe and a growing digital presence.

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whitestuff-about@2x
whitestuff-about@2x

Founded in 1985 as a small T-shirt business to fund ski trips to the French Alps, White Stuff has grown into what is today an iconic apparel brand in the United Kingdom and EU.

 Built on pillars of originality, sustainability, and quality, the brand boasts more than 120 retail stores across Europe and a growing digital presence.

Go to the Results

A New Chapter

With the surge in ecommerce over the past several years, White Stuff knew that a digital transformation was needed to provide customers with brand experiences that would drive lifetime value.

“Even though our customer demographic is slightly more mature, more than half of our customers are shopping on their mobile devices,” said Steve Borg, Head of Technology at White Stuff.

whitestuff-new-chapter@2x

“Customers are more connected than ever. If your digital transformation is sitting behind or you’re lacking in digital enablement, you can’t compete and survive in this environment.”

One particular challenge was that the company’s previous ecommerce platform was a monolith, which resulted in costly delays when White Stuff needed to adapt quickly. “We understood that it was going to be essential to really change tracks on our platform so that we could accelerate our growth, keep up with our ambition, keep up with customers’ expectations of us, and our ambitions for what we wanted to deliver for our customers in terms of an experience,” Steve explains. “And we were just not going to get there with the platform we were on. Progress was way too slow.”

The Solution

Selecting the Right Partners

For White Stuff, finding the right tech stack to deliver on a superior customer experience was a top priority.

Partnering with Apply Digital for implementation, White Stuff opted to work with the BigCommerce ecommerce platform, along with Alokai (previously Vue Storefront) for digital storefront, Amplience for content management, Akeneo for product information management, and Constructor for search and product discovery. 

Rather than more monolithic software, this tech stack offered the clear advantages of a MACH (microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless) approach. A highly composable suite of products would allow White Stuff the freedom to integrate platform and platform data and then use that data to quickly pivot and adapt. 

But there was another key factor in their decision-making process. “We have a relatively small team, and therefore we look most importantly 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.”

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A Team Effort

Data-Driven Product Discovery with Constructor

+8 %
in average time on site
+9 %
in pages ver visit
+80 %
in site speed
-16 %
in bounce rate
White Stuff’s previous monolithic architecture had resulted in lack of usable data on the merchandising side. The team had struggled to find a product discovery solution that would allow them to leverage the data they were already collecting on site for personalization. Their previous product discovery solution was also difficult to use and the team struggled with adoption.

But it was clear even from the joint proof of concept that working with Constructor would be different. Constructor’s complimentary, risk-free Proof Schedule™ allows prospective partners to insert a two-line snippet of code on their site and begin collecting customer clickstream data immediately. Ross Loughlin, Head of Ecommerce at White Stuff, recalls, “A massive benefit was having the beacon on our live site collecting data. We were actually using some of those insights from the beacon to take actions on the live site — and this was before we’d even transitioned to Constructor.” 

The ease of use and strong partnership from the Constructor team empowered White Stuff to leverage the creation of Collections pages, personalised landing pages that can be built quickly and populated with relevant, attractive products for each customer query by Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™. “What we weren’t expecting was the lift in organic SEO from creating these pages,” says Rob Carter, Senior Ecommerce Manager. “SEO was incredibly manual before and impossible to manage. The speed with which we can create pages now and have them optimised for SEO is fantastic.”

Armed with Constructor’s trending searches, White Stuff expedited the launch of several Christmas Collections pages and campaigns as they saw that customers were searching for gifts and decorations earlier than anticipated. “Six weeks earlier, we’d heard ‘It’s too early, the customer isn’t ready,’” Rob says. “We could see that those queries were low volume, but they were on the rise. That really made us bring our plans forward. It was really useful to act on.”

The Results

In addition to the sitewide lifts in SEO and customer engagement brought about by White Stuff’s digital transformation, the team also saw notable improvements in product discovery metrics.

+21 %
in search conversion rate
+8 %
in average order value
+25 %
in search transactions

In addition to significant increases in overall conversion rate and revenue, White Stuff saw increases in search conversion rate, average order value, and search transactions.

Seeing improved results from search that will continue to optimise over time, White Stuff is now focused on increasing the number of search sessions by making search more visible on site. “We now feel more confident in guiding people down that road than we were before,” Ross explains. “It will be an important part of our next brand evolution process.”

White Stuff has been encouraged by Constructor’s outcomes to such an extent that they’re also exploring leveraging the platform in an omnichannel capacity. “Even in our stores, our site is being used as an endless aisle solution for clienteling. It’s already adding value there because of the improvement in search,” Steve says. “There’s a use case there for optimising those results and really creating a modern shop floor.”

Is there room for improvement with your current search vendor?​ Find out.

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