Designing a fully customizable ecommerce site for vintage shopping and rentals

The brand

No introduction is required for the enfant terrible of the fashion industry.

Jean Paul Gaultier is world famous for bringing high fashion to the streets, and street fashion to the catwalk. Innovation is at the core of the brand, which has existed since 1982 and comprises hundreds of fragrances and fashion sub-brands. 

In a sign of keeping with the times, Jean Paul Gaultier recently entrusted the keys to his kingdom to a new generation of fashion designers, whom he invited to reinterpret his themes and reinvent the brand. This resulted in a new line of items that were heavily inspired by genderfluid and neopunk influences.

The team at Jean Paul Gaultier approached us with a unique challenge: to build a new ecommerce website where customers — mostly sustainability-minded Gen Z and Millennials — could rent unique pieces from the sample collection of the Jean Paul Gaultier archive.

The website needed to have the look and feel of an editorial page — with bold graphic design, and room for creative text placement — while also allowing for all the necessary ecommerce functionalities.

Specifically, they needed a website that could:

• Enable both the resale of vintage items and the rental of archival items

• Facilitate the publication of lookbooks for press releases ahead of new shows

• Have the look and feel of the iconic fashion brand, with many editorial components

• Support several currencies and allow worldwide product shipping

• Enable more precise customer segmentation

• Decrease the daily cost of maintaining and updating their CRM

• Allow for ultra-personalized content, tailored to their marketing strategy
  

For Jean Paul Gaultier, our highly-experienced team of developers, technical leads and project managers delivered a headless ecommerce architecture that was fully modular. As opposed to building everything with one and the same tool, such as Shopify, a modular approach has the advantage of being flexible and highly customizable.

Today, our headless infrastructure enables the Jean Paul Gaultier team to better manage content through fully customizable pages with no limitations on how to display information. This is essential for a client for whom design and aesthetics are everything. What’s more, our user-friendly Prismic backoffice enables Jean Paul Gaultier’s content managers to alter pages without having to write a single line of code.

Besides this added flexibility in terms of design, there is also a strategic advantage to our headless approach — it enables the client to migrate to any platform in the future and ensure that the site will still be fully compatible. In other words, the site we delivered is able to evolve.

• Powerful editorial capabilities

• Automated batch publishing of content

• Advanced search and filtering via Algolia

• Custom stock alerts / pre order

• Virtual Try On

• Analytics

At Unlikely.Technology, we care about the long term success and satisfaction of our clients. That’s why we always follow up with them even after a project is completed.

The Jean Paul Gaultier site is still in constant evolution: each month, the client asks us to develop new components and add new pages, and they consult us whenever they require feedback or run into issues. 

Currently, we are working on developing more editorial components, including video and animation, as well as a custom-developed Virtual Try-on section to allow customers to try on product items in a digital 3D environment. In addition, we are working on adding a pre-order option for users before new collections are launched.

After the successful completion of the project for Jean Paul Gaultier, our technology agency is excited to keep creating bespoke digital experiences for brands in the future, including those under the Puig umbrella.