Zingarelle: Fashion Ecommerce Case Study

Zingarelle is a luxury lifestyle brand owned by Karizma (UK) who design, import and distribute branded nightwear, toweling and home wares for the wholesale and retail markets in the UK and EU. Karizma approached FIFO to launch Zingarelle's first ecommerce website directly targeting the ladies fashion and lifestyle based accessories market, where quality is of paramount importance. Karizma also owns the Lily Blue brand which focuses on the more affordable nightwear and loungewear market.

Given Karizma's reputation among its clients and the fact that Zingarelle's brand values are based on quality and luxury, the new website required a high level attention to detail. Being an ecommerce website, it was vital that the shopping process was kept simple in order to avoid shoppers exiting the purchasing process prematurely. And furthermore, cross-selling was clearly of great importance to increase consumer spending, where (as is often the case) high volume is key among low margin goods.

From a technical perspective, requirements included full content management, ability to modify product options, move products between main sections, stock control including low stock warnings and gift-wrap and gift messages among a myriad of other functionality.

Zingarelle's website was designed to maximise usability whilst portraying the products as high quality and sensual - akin to the brand values. The use of cream and pastel pink as part of the overall conceptual design adds to feeling of femininity and luxury. And tasteful use of photography maintains the quality feel.

To improve the overall shopping process a number of features have been added. Firstly, within the product detail pages, all colour options are displayed using a graphical swatch to enable easy colour comparison. Secondly, at the base of each product detail page, three related items are displayed not only to assist customers in their shopping experience, but to improve deep linking by search engine bots (further assisted by the dynamically updated site map in the footer). A third feature includes a shopping basket (top right) that remains visible even when shoppers add items to their basket; this feature allows customers to continue shopping hassle-free and encourages customers to add further items to their shopping basket as opposed to checking out.

The technical ecommerce solution was built upon the proven Calligram application server platform delivering an easy-to-use interface allowing Karizma employees to make relevant updates to products, photography, prices and copy-based pages, as well as specifically requested functionality such as stock control. Whilst Zingarelle opted for a pre-registration based system (i.e. customers register before shopping), in order to avoid shoppers exiting prematurely, all forms are kept to a minimum length coupled with an easy to follow "you are here" graphic highlighting each concurrent step required before completion.

In conclusion, the website has been highly successful, not only from the perspective of customer volume, revenue and satisfaction, but also because it has generated more revenue for the wholesale business (Karizma) as a result of the confidence and trust Zingarelle has generated among Karizma's wholesale prospects. We'd call that a success story!

If you would like to learn more about this case study or FIFO's services in general, please call Jonathan Saipe on 0845 680 1236 or email us.