Fashion brand Joy adopts a digital-first mindset with ecommerce

She is a feminine, independent, full-time worker in her thirties, who likes to wear curated dresses and spend the weekends outdoors, with family and friends. Lately, she has been shopping online more than she ever did, especially on her phone. Still, she prefers quality over quantity, but really likes to change outfits, always keeping that functional yet stylish, flattering look. That’s the buyer persona of Joy, the British fashion brand that has five stores all over the United Kingdom and is now driving its efforts towards ecommerce.

Technologically prepared for COVID-19

In 2019, the management team of Joy realized it was spending quite a lot of money on development rather than marketing and sales and it wanted to change that. The previous ecommerce platform had to be upgraded and that was the moment when the idea of replatforming the fashion website appeared. In this case, Joy chose VTEX.

“One of our priorities was to ride on that exponential curve that businesses who use VTEX are experiencing, rather than having to do upgrades every now and then and living in an upgrade-plateauing cycle.“

Dylan Chadha, Commercial Director of Joy

It is not the first time that VTEX has been chosen for its exponential growth, but the benefits are far from stopping there. In most of the cases, the retailers – fashion or otherwise – seek for personalization of their ecommerce channel, and the variety of applications that the interface has is usually a key point in finally deciding to implement it. 

With VTEX, Joy was able to implement customer reviews, ratings, wishlists, a customized checkout, a sleeker look-n-feel, as well as Apple Pay and Klarna – all to increase brand loyalty. 

“For the past 10 years or so, the choice has been between an ecommerce platform that meant that you had to devote a lot of resources to developing it into something close to your vision, or working with a straight out of the box product that gave you very little scope in terms of modification. We experienced both scenarios, learning the hard way in the process and ultimately we changed to VTEX because it ticked a lot of boxes for us. We’ve also found it was easy to coordinate the agencies with the internal team. We wanted to make sure we worked efficiently.“

Dylan Chadha, Commercial Director of Joy

In hindsight, all that investment was worthwhile when the COVID-19 pandemic appeared. During the lockdown period, Joy’s physical stores were closed for more than 6 months, and all the efforts were then directed to the online channel. That’s when Louche, a second online channel emerged, as a need caused by the pandemic.

The newly-opened brand Louche has the same womenswear assortment of Joy but it only offers proprietary items. Preserving that London style, which is a mix of a contemporary casual aesthetic with signature vintage touches, the brand has its own plans of capturing all those women who want to find a nice floral dress in just a few clicks. Despite no marketing investment to hype up its presence, the results are already promising, with LFL revenue for the first quarter since launch up 209% and conversion rate up 41%.

On Joy, however, you can easily find womenswear, menswear and even homeware and accessories, all available online and offline. These articles are part of a multi-brand structure functioning under the Joy umbrella, without stating who’s the supplier behind each item. The company’s intention is to now optimise the results (e.g. the cost-per-click) in the UK and, afterwards, it will broaden the scope to Europe and America.