Benefits of Storyblok for luxury and high-end retail brands

When planning to implement Storyblok as a content management system (CMS) for your clients’ high-end retail and luxury brands projects, you should know businesses operating in this sector face multiple challenges arising from two major factors: Offering high-class, luxury, and sophisticated products and targeting their offers and services to a very specific group of customers with high expectations. Therefore, when creating a perfect digital platform for luxury brands, it’s essential for you and your clients to answer two most important questions: How to present and showcase a brand’s products in the most functional and aesthetically appealing way as well as how to cater to the most demanding audience’s tastes. These issues are, in fact, very multidimensional and this is why Storyblok, with its various functionalities, can help you and your clients achieve a luxury platform’s goals. Let’s guide you through the high-end retail and luxury sector’s challenges and intricacies as well as some of the best strategies to overcome them with Storyblok.

Treat your special guests exceptionally

The luxury-sector’s target audience are people seeking high-end products and services that offer quality, exclusivity, and status. This includes affluent B2C customers and high-net-worth B2B entities that prioritize having access to high-end services, items, and experiences. Most of the time, the high-end retail industry’s audience knows exactly what they are looking for. If there is a case where their goal when purchasing goods or services isn’t defined yet, they might subconsciously look for factors or stimulus that will make them want to start their buying journey.

Those who demand a lot, expect above average user experience, treatment, and attitude when visiting digital platforms. Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that they don't always look for the products they really need: In this case, the so-called emotional purchasing comes into play, where the emotions accompanying user experience and its results are the main driver to start the buying journey. Luxury brands offering high-class products and services should therefore offer them using the best-of-class technology solutions.

Having that said, we talked to our partners and clients who had the opportunity to create their luxury digital journeys with us. Let’s discover how to cater to the most sophisticated customer needs with a headless CMS and Storyblok’s powerful capabilities.

Detail-oriented design with a luxurious feel

The first thing customers see when entering a website is the visual presence of it, which is a luxury brand’s digital business card. However cliché it may sound, it’s really about knowing how those customers want to feel on a website and what kind of customer journey they want to have there. They need to feel an exceptional and luxurious user experience from the very first impression, which will evoke a subconscious sense of landing in the right place. With Storyblok, it’s possible to tackle this challenge from different design angles. Having that said, we talked to our partners and clients who had the opportunity to create their luxury digital journeys with us. Let’s discover how to cater to the most sophisticated customer needs with a headless CMS and Storyblok’s powerful capabilities.

Chopard & Storyblok:

Chopard, a luxurious and prestigious jewelry brand, needed a modern website with outstanding visual performance to make their products talk for themselves to the most demanding customers. The company turned to Razorfish for help in a modern platform for their My Happy Hearts products launch creation.

The most important feature when creating the project’s visual side was Storyblok’s Visual Editor, which enabled Chopard’s content creators and marketers to streamline visual testing, edit changes quickly with drag & drop functionality, and see the results in real-time.

Additionally, Razorfish decided to leverage Storyblok’s headless integration capabilities and implemented Cloudinary for Digital Asset Management (DAM). Thanks to this, the agency could unleash the full potential of Chopard’s outstanding multimedia by storing, hosting, and managing high quality pictures and videos. Cloudinary’s multidimensional functionalities such as video/image cropping, resizing, uploading files from different sources, and metadata management, made Chopard’s new platform look modern and sophisticated, maintaining all the design-related components in an extremely high-quality.

Feel free to discover more about the integration’s functionalities on our Ecosystem Expanded - Cloudinary highlight.

Chopard’s outstanding visual presence was also achieved by integrating TwicPics for Content Delivery Network (CDN), which delivered perfectly adjusted and responsive multimedia to create a visual-rich website presence.

Storyblok's reusable components creating consistent, detail-oriented, and professional visuals

A visually well-maintained and consistent digital platform says a lot about a luxury brand. As this industry’s customers will most likely pay great attention to detail, they’re going to look for it also when visiting high-end retail websites. What does achieving such an effect have to do with Storyblok?

Damen Yachting (Amels) & Storyblok:

Our partner Iquality was invited by Damen Yachting to revamp and rebrand their website, which required tackling complex digital challenges of the project and finding the balance between a new platform’s innovation and uninterrupted multimedia performance control. Iquality, having an experience with building Amels Yachting website for the same company, knew from the very beginning that the brand’s new project must remain consistent, creating a fully-immersive visual experience.

This challenge was tackled thanks to Storybloks’s multi-layer component approach: This allowed content creators to save and edit blocks without limits, fill them with content, and freely customize them. Additionally, Iquality could use the previously built components that were created when working on their previous Amels Yachting project. Thanks to this, it was possible to create a fully-immersive and unique digital experience for Damen Yachting visitors, while maintaining the platform consistent with the company’s official landing page.

Storyblok-compatible functional eCommerce integration

Outstanding visual effects on a luxury brand’s digital platform is one thing, but ultimately, the goal of creating a new high-end retail website is also to assure streamlined, smooth, and satisfying buying experience for customers. Storyblok’s wide range of eCommerce integrations stand out with uninterrupted product description data corresponding abilities, user-friendliness and transparency, not leaving behind technological interchangeability. Here’s how we help our partners and clients:

NGRAVE & Storyblok

An ideal example of amazing eCommerce integration implementation is NGRAVE project’s case: The company has asked take it_, our partnering agency, for help in rebuilding and revamping their luxurious cryptocurrency digital platform, which besides educating the market, sells secure hardware wallets for storing and managing crypto.

The main project’s goal was to integrate the company’s landing page with a future-proof eCommerce solution to connect NGRAVE’s landing page to their online shop.

Take it opted for using Shopify for an eCommerce layer, which is fully compatible with Storyblok. This decision resulted with NGRAVE’s futuristic, modern, and consistent buying experience interface. This kind of approach strengthened customer engagements on the website and let well-structured product information and their equivalents in their eShop smoothly correspond to each other.

Additionally, in the case of some projects, it may happen that certain limitations (for example country-related) do not allow luxury brands’ customers to make payments directly from an eCommerce layer integration level. Here is where Storyblok’s headless functionalities can also be helpful: The API-first approach allows it to connect an eShop to a chosen payment solution that can bypass product selling blockers.

If you’re interested in exploring a wide range of eCommerce solutions that are compatible with Storyblok, feel free to check out our eCommerce partner listing page.

An eCommerce integration is one of many examples of leveraging Storyblok’s powerful technology implementation capabilities. Your clients’ perfectly adjusted technology stack is crucial when creating a high-end retail brands projects, having integrations interchangeability and innovation in mind:

Let us help you serve the luxury omnichannel experience wherever it’s needed

To engage luxury brands’ customers it’s essential to be there for them anywhere they want to get in touch with their desired products and services. With this in mind, when operating in the high-end retail industry, you and your clients need to remember about their platforms’ omnichannel approach, which is also possible to be achieved by opting for Storyblok. Let’s explore a great example of eCube’s collaboration with Tesla, who together, created an immersive multichannel digital experience.

Tesla & Storyblok

eCube, besides modern platform creation, aimed to extend Tesla’s innovative Kiosk System to expose their multiple content on self-service terminals. The reason behind this idea was to collect customer data such as contact details via a form, for example, to book test drives, as well as to expose Teala’s car collection on interactive devices. eCube decided to tackle this challenge by leveraging Storyblok’s omnichannel capabilities by integrating external Customer Relationship Management (CRM) via an API. In this way, it was possible to store clients’ data in the system and use it for future purposes. Additionally, the omnipresent approach made it easy to expose Tesla’s amazing products on different advanced devices and to let customers explore them autonomously.

Find out more about how to take advantage of Storyblok omnichannel possibilities, here!

Is Storyblok the future of Luxury digital journeys?

We are over the moon to see so many impressive luxury-oriented brands and their partners which have decided to create their digital journey with us! We’re even more excited for amazing future projects coming up. Stay tuned!

To put all the things we learned together, these are the key takeaways on why it’s a great idea to choose Storyblok as a luxury brand’s headless CMS of choice:

• Outstanding, sophisticated, and detail-oriented visual performance by flexible content creation possibilities thanks to Storyblok’s Visual Editor
• Consistent and transparent digital experience possible thanks to the component-based approach
• Assuring an immersive and uninterrupted purchasing journey for demanding clients by integrating best-of-breed and compatible eCommerce solutions
• Serving a multidimensional omnichannel experience leveraging Storyblok’s API-first approach