Forty Five Ten is the premier eCommerce retailer for global luxury and emerging brands, that presents fashion as art in one of its highest forms. With brick-and-mortar stores thriving in prestigious locations such as Hudson Yards in New York, and Main Street in Dallas, Forty Five Ten needed an equally revered eCommerce experience. We elevated their eCommerce experience through a highly-sophisticated omni-channel service redesign that could more effectively meet the demand of the business.

Our Approach

Since the site was created for the eclectic shopper, we ensured the user experience supported Forty Five Ten’s editorial shopping strategy and brought their in-store curation to the online experience.

We quickly decided that the team was not large enough for a complex Hybris migration but would benefit greatly from moving to Shopify Plus instead. We made this decision after mapping out their operation through a service blueprinting workshop.

Key Takeaways

• Service Design and Research

• UX Design – Key Transformations

• Omni-channel Inventory Management

• Magento to Shopify Plus Migration

Service Design and Research

Understanding the Problem

By implementing a series of service design workshops and stakeholder interviews, we began our exploration to better understand the frontstage and backstage experience. Through this process, we gained clear visibility of the pain points experienced by the eCommerce team. Content management was proving to be a serious roadblock for the operations team as the Magento Enterprise platform was slow, tedious, and expensive. With the help of ethnographic research, we were able to shadow employees and document the entire process. We then used this data to identify gaps and challenges to be remedied on the new platform. The blueprinting exercise allowed us to define all the customer touchpoints and dive into the impact of each action. We connected this blueprint to Miro to make it an actionable document for the team.

UX Design – Key Transformations

Shop the Editorial

Forty Five Ten had an incredible team of curators and art directors who created compelling visual content for the physical stores. Our team decided to use their exceptional talent to tell shoppable stories. We designed a unique “Shop the Look” feature that was easy to tag and update from the Shopify Plus backend.

Robust Filtering

With a large and uniquely defined catalog of products, Forty Five Ten needed its taxonomy and custom fields to be searchable and instantly filtered. Using Shopify Plus as the base, we built a custom search and filter experience to boost functionality.

Omni-channel Inventory Management

Data

It was critical for Forty Five Ten to ship products from any location, as these one-of-a-kind items could be carried in any of their 5 locations.

Our engineering team integrated the site with a centralized system to manage inventory and the product catalog. Our engineers worked with Team Work retail to implement a multi-store integration that sent product data upstream before routing order data to the appropriate store for fulfillment.

Magento to Shopify Plus Migration

Migration and SEO

One of the biggest challenges when migrating platforms is retaining the search authority. For a brand with high-value press, it was critical for us to map the entire experience to the new Shopify Plus platform. We did this by auditing over 100,000 possible backlinks and redirecting them to new Shopify pages.

Component-Based Architecture

Magento’s site had been built in a way that made it difficult to create new content quickly. We made sure to keep things fresh and manageable on the site by creating components that were primarily the same but partially customizable. We also made these available to be used on any new page, granting managers a great deal of flexibility.

Our Collaboration

In order to meet a 2-month deadline, our strategists embedded themselves at the Forty Five Ten headquarters in Dallas. They designed and employed collaborative service design workshops that helped uncover any possible bottlenecks, and migrate the entire experience flawlessly.