Think of Neiman Marcus, and “designer” comes to mind: designer fashions, a well-designed e-commerce site and stores with design flair.
The luxury retailer also is known for its lookbooks that feature a designer’s new collection or a category of products, such as holiday gifts. But in today’s world of online shopping, it wanted the lookbooks to be more than just eye-catching photos on a screen. “We want them to be easy to shop versus just lining up images,” says Peggy Trowbridge, vice president of merchandising and web stores for Neiman Marcus.
Enter Zmags. Its Creator rich media platform enables retailers to add such functionality as pop-up videos, motion, and buy buttons to product images, making the images easier to view and purchase from. This holiday season, Neiman Marcus, No. 43 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide, has about three dozen lookbooks with buying functions lined up.
“The creative team does its part to make the lookbook beautiful, and then we add the links to make it shoppable,” says Leigh Ivey, director, divisional merchandiser, Neiman Marcus online. A shopper clicks on a look in a photo, and up pops the screen that lets her add the products in it—say, pants, a vest, necklace and shoes—directly to her shopping bag.
Lookbooks designed with Zmags Creator display a hero image followed by 5-7 pages, all of which have buttons that can be clicked so consumers can buy directly from the images. “It’s more intuitive to click when you’re in the lookbook rather than go back and find the items farther down the page,” Ivey says. Consumers can still scroll down the page to see more images and get quick looks that offer different views of the products.
Neiman Marcus launched five lookbooks within the first six weeks of using Zmags Creator last year and soon after added 45 for a total of 50 in 12 weeks. Customer engagement metrics have been strong, says Neiman Marcus, though it would not disclose numbers beyond saying that during one seven-week period in the second quarter, Creator-styled lookbooks had 3 million page views and 10% of those converted into a “quick view” experience that starts the purchasing process.
Neiman Marcus would not disclose its costs for Zmags. Apparel retailer New York & Co., which was an early adopter of Creator, in March signed a one-year, $30,000 contract with Zmags that encompasses all content pushed live on its e-commerce site, whether a catalog or a page promoting a dress collection, Paul Carroll, New York & Co.’s vice president of digital & e-commerce creative, said earlier this year. Creator pricing typically is “mid-low 5 figures to mid-low 6 figures” and based on site traffic, Zmags CEO Brian Rigney says. “We do not charge based on the number of users, domains or modules.”
For Neiman Marcus, “it’s always about improving the customer experience and making it easier for her to shop,” Trowbridge says. “Executives within the company have noted the difference and we feel pretty positive about it. The merchants think it’s great.”
Encouraging data on page views prompted Neiman Marcus to use Zmags for some pages on the Bergdorf Goodman e-commerce site and it may use the platform for Neiman’s home page, Ivey says.
Even though Neiman has a deep IT team, using Creator does not require coding or high-tech skills, Rigney says. “We have a drag and drop feature, so when our customers are ready to publish, they pull up a page to which they want to publish and they have the window with the experience they’ve created. The designer can release the page, preview it, save it and have it live on the site in less than five minutes,” Rigney says.
Zmags’ software-as-a-service model, which lets companies use the web to access software hosted on its servers, aims to be “agnostic” in working with third-party platforms, whether IBM Commerce, Magento, hybris or Oracle’s ATG Web Commerce, Rigney says. For example, Creator has a Demandware widget that allows a customer who uses the e-commerce software provider to search for “blue dresses,” grab the desired image of a blue dress and drag it to the page. The widget means Demandware remains the system of record for content because it pulls all of the product information so the designer doesn’t have to search and grab an SKU number or other data separately.
Ivey says training the core team at Neiman Marcus on Creator was simple, though it took a little longer to launch the first lookbooks because of customization and back-end system complexities on the retailer’s end. Now, Neiman Marcus generates four or five lookbooks a week with the platform. “It’s in the regular flow of business,” she says. “We’ll do about 1,000 pages or about 100 books [this year].”
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