EST
Creating custom solutions in high-end womenswear
Revitalizing the luxury fashion e-commerce experience with BCBG
BCBG is a luxury womenswear label, beloved for decades as an outfitter for high-profile events such as weddings, proms, and anniversaries. The brand approached Half Helix for support evolving their digital experience. They experienced pain points with their Shopify 1.0 site, which had an abundance of apps and was heavily reliant on the builder.io CMS tool to maintain. The Half Helix team built a strong trusting relationship with BCBG, which enabled them to effectively propose the best tech stack, make recommendations for design best practices, and provide guidance on decision-making. We transitioned their site to Shopify 2.0 within two months, creating flexibility with features, efficiency for their in-house team, and a lowered operating cost. Given the scale of the brand, the project required a meticulous understanding of the brand’s needs while balancing its diverse channels, including in-store retail, wholesale, and various retail partners. The Half Helix team ensured the new site told their rich brand story while increasing product discoverability and showcasing all the channels where clients can shop their fashion line.
Disciplines
- Shopify Development
- Theme Customization
Location
Visit Live Site
01
Migrating to Shopify 2.0
BCBG had ambitious plans for their brand and needed flexibility to easily manage and update content and merchandise pages. Their previous site had major performance issues due to builder.io, creating additional time between when a page is loaded and when content is shown. This posed issues with customer experience and disadvantages for search engine indexing. The Half Helix team took special care to build a new site that increased speed to market for new features, create admin flexibility, refreshed the brand, all while loading 4 times faster. In the process, we created meticulous theme documentation to ensure the site is sustainable and easy to manage for multiple brand operators.
02
Simplified Tech Stack with Customized Theme
Maintaining the functionality that BCBG’s previous site had was a crucial part of the migration process. The Half Helix team conducted a deep discovery to understand each specific functionality and how their previous site worked. They were heavily dependent on apps that impacted site performance, so the team built many custom solutions while leveraging Shopify’s native functionality for the new site, including a new size chart, collection merchandising, product information on PDP, and pre-order. We also improved integrations to certain apps, including the brand’s final sale and back in stock features, as well as their clothing rental suite. Overall, the Half Helix team preserved the functionality that BCBG was used to, while introducing modernized improvements.
03
Enhanced Theme Flexibility and Improved Styling
Significant enhancements were made to sections and modules of the BCBG site to provide increased flexibility within the admin theme settings while improving user experience. Global changes included updated typography in sections across the site to stay consistent with the brand’s style guide and ensured fonts were perfectly across pages. A custom banner was added to the top of the homepage, addressing the need for missing functionality prior to launch. Furthermore, the Half Helix team redesigned the navigation to enhancing product discoverability, improving the overall experience of the BGBG site.
