The Brand

Paul Smith, a luxury fashion brand with iconic shops across the globe, needed the digital commerce experience to truly represent the brand. Many people don’t realize that Paul Smith is a real person, he still comes to work everyday at the London Head Office – and his office has to be seen to be believed. The Paul Smith brand isn’t just fashion. It’s art. It’s lively. It’s fun.

The digital team set out to create a Digital Flagship that sold products, yes. But also delivered joy, discovery, and creativity to all who used it. To build something that suited the needs of the business exactly, and could grow and change with it too. To do this, they knew they needed a composable ecommerce architecture.

The Challenge

There is a common misconception about MACH (microservices, API-first, composable, headless) architecture, that it’s all or nothing. But that’s not true. In the words of Hannah Bennett, Head of Digital at Paul Smith, ecommerce brands that are thinking about this kind of architecture are further into the journey than they may think.

Hannah herself started at Paul Smith 14-years ago, starting in the ecommerce warehouse whilst studying at university, and quickly moved through the business. Since then, Hannah has been hands-on in most areas of the company – from picking and packing, to returns, fraud, content, project management, and development, and now Head of Digital, leading the MACH charge, and reaping the benefits along the way.

Hannah decided that the best way to ‘go composable’ was to start from the frontend services and work the way down to the nitty gritty areas of the backend. She did this starting with search, installing Klevu on the existing monolithic frontend, before the larger replatforming project even started. This allowed Paul Smith to lean on Klevu AI to maximize conversion and revenue during the transformation.

The move also represented a major milestone in the brand’s transition towards becoming a more composable organization – something that would prove essential for Paul Smith’s continued success in the ecommerce space.

The Solution

When Paul Smith decided to rebuild the ecommerce platform, they knew they had to find the right partner. The brand has an in-house development team, but brought on an agency to fill the headless frontend and backend knowledge gaps the team had.

“Limesharp was the perfect choice – they had experience with Headless (VueJS), GraphQL, and Magento sites and other ecommerce platforms, and were also a great design agency. We’re in a kind of sweet spot now where we lean on them, mainly for the frontend resource, but they can support other areas too.” – Hannah Bennett

Ed Bull, Founder “Through our discovery process with Paul Smith we found the brand content that was tucked away in the blog contained incredible product information. This was particularly prevalent with the many collaborations that took place over the 50 years of Paul Smith. This formed part of our objectives, how can we bring that rich content to shoppers focussed on product discovery.

Athos Commerce allowed us to visually show relevant stories relating to products for the curious customer. The headless technology approach meant we could create a very unique design leaning on Klevu’s API’s to fetch the data we needed. When you search for a collaboration on the site now like Manchester United or Cycling the stories are showcased with the product which is really powerful.”

In addition to the replatforming project, the team at Paul Smith had to adapt to new processes. Simply prioritizing and valuing documentation helped the Paul Smith team challenge existing processes and define new and better ways of working. Unpacking the monolithic processes also enabled the team to carefully select the microservices that suited their needs out-of-the-box, and plan for the future.

The Paul Smith ecommerce team loves Athos Commerce for many reasons, but the most compelling might be the way it leverages AI technology to its fullest potential. Now, the team can serve up more accurate results to shoppers faster than ever before. Paul Smith uses Athos search, and category merchandising software from the Product Discovery Platform. As a brand, Paul Smith has learned to trust the AI to deliver the right product and content results to shoppers, manually merchandising as lightly as possible.

Athos AI automatically has insights into real-time shopper behavior, which in turn re-orders products and content to maximize conversions and revenue.
This balance of AI automation and strategic control through the easy-to-use admin panel has been a huge boon for Paul Smith’s ecommerce operations – resulting in higher conversion rates, greater sales figures, and improved customer satisfaction. The entire team is overjoyed with the operational benefits that Klevu has enabled.

The Results

The result has been nothing short of remarkable. From increasing sales figures across all sectors of their online business, to strengthening relationships with major resellers worldwide, Paul Smith has seen the impact that its enhanced digital presence has made. 

Looking at the 8-weeks prior to installing Athos, compared to the 8-weeks after:

• 74% increase in revenue from search
• 31% increase in conversion rate
• 26% increase in per session value

Partner with Athos Commerce to transform your ecommerce store. With proven tools and expertise in search and merchandising, we empower businesses to achieve measurable growth. Contact us today to start optimizing your store for success.