SOL Lingerie

Design / Shopify / User Experience

Sol Lingerie Shopify

Finding the Perfect Fit for Lingerie Experts

Sweden Unlimited worked with luxury lingerie multi-brand retailer SOL to bring their impeccable customer service and vast knowledge of perfect-fitting lingerie online. We created a custom look for the store and developed the entire Shopify platform, which included several new features for them. One of the key elements is the facility to book an appointment for fitting, and for existing customers, the ability to book with the person you already know.

Sol Lingerie Founders

ABOUT SOL

Sisters Cindy and Jeanie opened the Store of Lingerie (SOL) in 1997 on the premise that perfect-fitting lingerie is more than just finding the right size, it’s about understanding the body and the customer. Having mastered this in their store in Denver, they wanted to take the concept online and chose Sweden to help them do it.

Exquisite customer service has always been a key part of any luxury retail experience, but perhaps never more so than when purchasing lingerie. Something that is so personal and the closest thing to your skin requires significant consideration for both the individual and the product. Some women go their whole lives wearing ill-fitting underwear, so when they finally try something that truly fits them, a new world opens up.

So herein was our challenge: how can we bring this level of service and care online?

VIEW STORE
Brand Identity Revision

In addition to the design of the site, we also undertook a slight revision to the brand’s overall look and feel. SOL had begun to shift and the website didn’t reflect the current look or thinking. While fun, it didn’t have a true representation of the warmth, kindness and service you get from the SOL team. So we began with enhancing the brand aesthetic – removing much of the bold yellow shade and ‘cute’ flowers etc for a more refined, quieter palette of neutral tones. We also reviewed typography, introducing a modern, elegant serif for titles, and a simple but warm sans serif for body copy.

SOL Lingerie

Ecommerce Store Design

When it came to the design of the website, one of the main goals was to ensure that the customer experience was effortless, akin to shopping in-store, and ensuring that expert help and guidance were always available along the way.

In addition, we wanted to elevate the brand to represent better the range of brands stocked by SOL and the level of service provided.

We introduced key clear visual navigation on the homepage, leading customers into the most popular categories, and implemented a unique layout. We also reviewed the navigation itself, enabling the ability to shop by product type or brand.

The other pages were then treated to a series of flexible CMS modules, enabling the SOL team to customize and tailor pages according to the content.
We worked to create a lot more breathing space across the main pages – which, as well as providing a more elevated aesthetic, also helps to bring a sense of calm when browsing. The mobile site was given a facelift in many,

Finally, we introduced a series of methods to assist with customer service, including a persistent bar at the top of the site directing customers to book a free consultation. This, too, was added to all product pages at the point of selecting a size. Just a few simple clicks and you can book an in-store fitting with an expert and, if you’ve had a previous fitting with someone, the option to select that person again.

Technology and Development

SOL’s business has a single supplier for all products, but until now, hadn’t been connected to their own ecommerce store. So we developed a number of unique and innovative technical solutions to enable their every day store management much simpler. Here are some of the highlights:

  • A PHP-based middleware was created that continually syncs each season’s products from third-party supplier Van De Velde, complete with all relevant product information, images, and metafield data used throughout the site. These imported products are then dynamically categorized and grouped based on style number (their equivalent of SKU) and other tertiary product information.
  • This middleware is also the throughput for Stocky, which aggregates the product totals from all the orders of the day and requests the backfill of Inventory from Van De Velde, creating a complete cycle of supply from their DTC store, retail locations and Van De Velde warehouse.
  • Given the limitations of how Van De Velde stores and presents product data, all products were grouped in the middleware according to size and season to create a single product with multiple size variations.
  • For merchandising, these products were also attributed to a “Style” metaobject type to enable the aggregation of products on the front end for swatching and color selection on the PDP and Product cards. Instead of using antiquated methods like tagging individual products or adding them to collections, this created an easy and efficient way of managing which products should be grouped and stored additional data related to each of the products (such as brand callout content, size guides, and other product specific information) so that it could be more globally set.

 

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