Prior to the pandemic, Australian activewear brand Lorna Jane recognised it had a problem: its e-commerce experience was simply not up to par.
When the brand’s website got busy, it slowed to a crawl, and when it got very busy, it crashed. Customers often complained that items they added to cart would simply disappear, or they couldn’t complete a transaction.
The on-premise solution also required Lorna Jane to keep a dedicated IT support team on hand to manage the site.
“As we were moving into the pandemic, we realised [the site] was going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting,” Lorna Jane’s head of business applications Peter Clarke told Inside Retail.
“Thankfully we were already on the path to relaunching the site, and we were able to reallocate resources to make sure that the new site was a success.”
Case in point: the day the business re-platformed to its new provider, Salesforce, was its biggest day of trade ever.
“It was an immediate success for us, because the experience became so much cleaner for the customer,” said Clarke.
“Overnight we all of a sudden had a first-class site, as opposed to what we had before, and that affected our business dramatically, because when other retailers were battening down the hatches we were ready to go.”
Lorna Jane saw at least half of its 100-plus stores shuttered during the lockdowns in Australia, which put much more pressure on the website to deliver as a sales channel. Thanks to the well-timed relaunch, it was able to handle the increased traffic.
Now that bricks-and-mortar is picking back up, the brand’s focus is on delivering a newly streamlined, unified omnichannel experience.
“We’re trying to approach [omnichannel] from a unified perspective, so the same customer is the same customer anywhere they shop, not just ‘they can shop anywhere’,” Clarke said.
“We’ve had click-and-collect in place for a while, and now we’ve launched endless aisle shopping. We’re delivering a much better omnichannel experience from an operational perspective, and it’s becoming a high double-figure percentage of our business.”
A digital-first future
The next step for Lorna Jane will involve making its mobile app transactional. Previously, the app only allowed customers to track their physical activity and behaviour, similarly to other fitness apps on the market, rather than shop.
But with digital now becoming a core sales channel for the brand, mobile must be part of that, Clarke said.
“People are taking these devices everywhere they go, and they should be a part of the brand experience. If you go into a retail store and you’re engaging with our staff, you should also be able to use our app in that space,” he said.
Beyond the launch of its app, Lorna Jane is experimenting with headless commerce: enabling it to decouple its e-commerce experience’s front end and back end, allowing for more customisation and freedom when delivering content to users.
“The appetite to try new things is in our DNA,” Clarke said.
“We don’t have a three-year roadmap anymore. Instead, we’re working on building out an ecosystem that is ready for whatever we need next.”
