The Background
La Femme, a fashion company specializing in Prom, Homecoming, Pageant, Evening, and Bridal attire, contacted Classy Llama to assist in creating a new channel for their surplus stock.
Warehousing over 150,000 dresses at any time, La Femme wanted to fulfill their shopper’s need for last-minute dresses for any occasion and capitalize on selling through overstock at the same time. InstantDress.com was founded to meet this need, and Classy Llama was ready to build the right solution.
Goals & Strategies
- Deliver MVP on a time sensitive launch date
- Offer FREE 3 Day shipping across the Continental US
- All dresses listed are in stock and ready to ship the same or next business day
- Allowing returns – not common in the dress industry
- Design and build a simple import path for configurable products
La Femme wanted to launch their site to be ready for the upcoming prom season; due to a tight timeline, we started the build utilizing as much of Magento Commerce’s native functionality as possible. After implementing a custom theme, the site launched with a basic feature set and product line in order to meet their initial objective. This provided InstantDress.com with a solid foundational site that could be further iterated as the brand grew.
Transferring product data between two systems can be very challenging. The team at InstantDress.com was able to extract product data from their ERP in the form of spreadsheets. While they were capable of managing data and executing imports, the need for configurable products (due to multiple colors and sizes of dresses) added extra complexity to the import. Classy Llama established an approach to the import that kept things simple, then used custom scripts to tie the dress variations together. This allowed us to streamline the shopping experience by refining product attributes, which resulted in customers being able to filter products and event type. The end result was an import process that cost the merchant minimal time, and quality catalog data on the site providing customers with a great shopping experience.
The flexibility of Magento Commerce paved the way for future iterations including a direct integration with their ERP as well as their other branded websites.