Two years after Frame launched its first e-commerce site, the denim company revamped its desktop and mobile site to better showcase its growing collection of products.
The new site is optimized to better promote its shift to a lifestyle brand, building on the momentum it has amassed since launching its first denim collection in 2012. In the last six years, the company has seen 30 percent year-over-year sales growth, propelling its expansion into new product areas like tops, dresses, outerwear, accessories and menswear. At the same time, Frame opened standalone stores in New York and San Francisco last year, to complement the 2,000 global retail locations that sell its products.
The push into lifestyle is also part of a strategic move to cultivate a competitive advantage over the rising crop of premium direct-to-consumer denim companies in recent years. Boasting a wider assortment could help Frame develop an edge over peers like AYR and DSTLD, which tripled its revenue last year.
“We started with jeans just to see if we could make product, and then we did shirts, and on to cashmere, and outerwear, and so on,” Frame co-founder Erik Torstensson told the Financial Times in August 2017. “We haven’t done it by making huge collections and opening up hundreds of doors on Day 1. We did it by doing one thing really well, and when that worked, we did the next thing, and we tried to do that really well.”
This same strategy has ultimately applied to Frame’s e-commerce site, which wasn’t developed until the brand’s fourth year — comparatively late for a company founded in the digital age. In its early form, the site stuck to basics. Now, Torstensson and his fellow co-founder Jens Grede recognized a need to raise awareness to its expanded product assortment and enlisted the help of digital agency King & Partners.
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“Frame was really focused on product and hadn’t been looking at the digital experience,” said Tony King, CEO and creative director at King & Partners. “The previous site was simple — it wasn’t bad but wasn’t sophisticated as far as customer experience and journey.”
Since the new site debuted last month, King said there has been a “big increase in consumer confidence” that is translating to conversions, though neither he nor Frame was able to provide specific numbers. However, King anticipates that the revamp, which took around four months from conception to rollout, will be a catalyst to bolstering online purchases, which currently comprise 10 percent of the brand’s sales.
To better attract shoppers, the new site includes an enhanced visual and interactive experience that more prominently highlights other products beyond denim. Like the old site, the new version is also powered by Shopify, though Frame focused on developing a fresh layout and navigation features that helped differentiate the page from a standard Shopify template. As such, it features extensive fit guides and filters by body type and style, alongside high-quality photography intended to provide more detail on fit.
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The Frame website’s denim fit guide, featured on the homepage
Frame and King & Partners also examined customer data and analytics on the original site to see what was working well and what needed improvement. The findings showed that navigation was a key challenge for shoppers, who were missing the other product categories, so Frame added added a static product bar to the top of the desktop site and bottom of the mobile site. The bar remains visible as you scroll, so that users can more prominently see the other categories.
“The initial site was very much a jeans and denim site, but now Frame is much more than that,” King said. “We wanted to tell the story of that and signify to the consumer that, although it’s well-known for denim, it’s more than a denim brand.”
Another priority for Frame was to create more dynamic web pages intended to exude a “friendly and human” tone, King said. The idea was to alleviate the stress of shopping for a particularly fickle product like denim, which has traditionally been a challenge for shoppers, even within the physical retail realm.
As a result, the denim fit guide is displayed prominently on the homepage, and King & Partners worked with Frame to include detailed product descriptions alongside product imagery. “It’s really about good photography and using the screen real estate the best possible way to maximize the size of the images and get an idea of fit,” King said.
Image courtesy of Frame
