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Founded in 2012, Ysé is a French lingerie and swimwear brand making sophisticated, contemporary pieces. Ysé is created by women, for women. Co-founder Clara Blocman Petit wanted to create a lingerie brand that would be truly committed to the female body, without cheating or tricks.
In 2015, Ysé opened its first boutique in Paris and partnered with Sézane and Monoprix. Today, it has three boutiques in Paris, one in Aix en Provence, and one in Bordeaux.
We helped Ysé rethink their whole ecommerce ecosystem from the ground up—just the type of challenge we enjoy taking on.
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We helped Ysé rethink their whole ecommerce ecosystem from the ground up — just the type of challenge we enjoy taking on.
In April 2020, Ysé asked us to rebuild their entire ecommerce ecosystem from scratch. Their legacy system was much too complicated and costly to maintain. It also didn’t meet their content customization needs.
As the brand was growing, Ysé needed a flexible technical architecture that could:
Enable an omnichannel online shopping experience for customers
Support several currencies and allow worldwide product shipping
Enable more precise customer segmentation
Decrease the daily cost of maintaining and updating their CRM
Help them gain greater control of their tools
Allow for ultra-personalized content, tailored to their marketing strategy
"Ysé needed a close partner by their side — someone who truly understood the DNA of their brand and could provide strategic support on all aspects of their ecommerce ecosystem, and not just their webshop."
We refuse to compromise on quality—that’s why we always handpick the best services and tools for each of our clients and plug them into our architecture.
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For Ysé, our highly-experienced team of developers, technical leads and project managers delivered a headless ecommerce architecture that was truly modular. As opposed to building everything with one and the same tool, a modular approach has the advantage of being flexible and highly customizable.
In other words, instead of using a monolithic architecture with a single point of control, we composed our ideal architecture and set up communication flows between the different nodes (ERP, CRM, PIM, ecommerce platform, website, WMS).
This approach allows our clients to free themselves from the limitations of one specific solution as well as ensuring their architecture is future-proof and not dependent on a tool that could very well one day disappear.
The final website for Ysé had the following features:
Powerful editorial capabilities
Modular component library in Prismic
Advanced search and filtering via Algolia
Integration with an ERP / CRM (NetSuite, Splio)
Integration with a PoS (Sitoo)
Integration with marketing automation tools (Celigo)
Custom stock alerts / returns management
E-reservation and pick-up in stores
Custom development of ‘Wishlist’ option for customers
Integrated live shopping social media solution, powered by Bambuzer
Broad range of innovative community engagement tools, such as quizzes and giveaways
Analytics
Omnichannel
Enable an omnichannel online shopping experience for customers.
Multi-currency
Support several currencies and allow worldwide product shipping.
Better CRM
Enable more precise customer segmentation an decrease the daily cost of maintaining and updating their CRM.
Autonomy & personalization
Help them gain greater control of their tools and allow for ultra-personalized content, tailored to their marketing strategy.
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“We worked with Unlikely on our site migration to headless Shopify and complete restructuration of our business around a central ERP. Their team really gave us options and pointed us in the right direction. Thanks to their flexibility and level of expertise, we were able to ship this project in record time!”
— Florence Romain, E-Commerce Director Ysé Paris
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Ysé is a brand that launches new collections and updates on a weekly basis. With the old infrastructure, for each weekly launch they had to go through a painstaking process of updating their technical infrastructure every week. This put significant strain on their workflow, leaving the team to put out fires and constantly chase after the facts.
Now, with our Prismic CMS, Ysé is able to schedule up four releases ahead of time, massively improving their workflow and enabling the team to work on editorial components (such as product photography for product pages) several weeks in advance.
An additional benefit of Prismic is the powerful editorial capabilities it offers. As such, we also developed a broad range of community engagement tools together with the client, such as quizzes and product giveaways, to boost customer retention and satisfaction.
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Using our Headless site, we were able to integrate various apps and APIs to meet the client’s precise needs.
One of the most important functionalities Ysé wanted to offer its customers was an in-stock alert to enable automated email notifications once certain products come back in stock. For this, Ysé required a dashboard with many functionalities, which we custom developed, since this did not exist natively on Shopify.
Among other things, this dashboard enables Ysé to:
View all clients who signed up for stock alerts
View the number of stock alerts
Select popular items for use in marketing campaigns
Export all data
Get insight into real-time data from their Shopify stock
In addition to the dashboard, Ysé wished to further widen the scope of their offer to customers by offering the option to try on items in physical stores before purchasing them online. To this end, we designed an e-reservation system for customers to make appointments at Ysé boutiques to try on items before purchasing. Clients now also have the option to pick up items purchased online at physical locations.
Last but not least, we also made it possible for Ysé to offer last-minute express parcel deliveries in under two hours during peak seasons, such as Christmas.
In short, our Headless architecture enables Ysé to benefit from fully integrated external solutions — such as Stuart, RelaisColis, and Click & Collect — thus creating a true omnichannel shopping experience for their customers.
We lifted the curtain on Ysé’s brand new, fully functional website, which was able to handle 200.000+ daily users with zero downtime.
Planning
Delivery in record speed and exactly according to schedule
Sales
+30% cart average+18% conversion
+50% increase in sales
Architecture
-50% estimated cost savings since switching to the new architecture
Easy to create
Where before there was a fixed template for new pages, requiring intensive development, Ysé’s merchandising team can now easily build new pages using 50+ components
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Comprehensive support
During six months, we provided tailor-made support to Ysé—not only working on their new website, but also building the entire business architecture surrounding it.
This involved coordinating between all the different partners and providing support whenever Ysé ran into issues. Indeed, even though we are a tech studio, providing comprehensive support to our clients on all aspects of a project is a major focus for us.
No room for error
Recreating the entire technical architecture of a brand is always challenging—but the stakes are extra high when you’re delivering for a big brand like Ysé. We needed to build something that could handle large peaks in traffic (depending on the fashion season) and also be loved by the brand’s highly engaged community.
Above all, we needed to build an infrastructure that could enable swift communication and visibility of all the aspects of Ysé business operations — from customer data, to orders, to logistics. Since Ysé launches new collections every two weeks, there was no room for error on our side.
“The most challenging thing about this project was that we had to recreate everything from scratch, while at the same time respecting the loyalty of Ysé’s vibrant community and tens of thousands of customers.”
— Simon, CTO Unlikely.Technology
Parallel workflows
Besides these technical challenges, we were also managing multiple teams and parallel workflows at the same time.
Developing the site together with our design partner Numbered was only one aspect of the project. Over the entire project duration, we had weekly meetings with the client to integrate their feedback into each step of the workflow and ensure things were progressing smoothly with all the coordinating partners.
Each team at Ysé faced its own set of challenges. For instance, the merchandising team had to test the CMS and the site’s functionalities, keeping an eye out for bugs; while the logistics team had to make sure that order flows were being directed to the ERP; and the marketing team had to check the customer segmentation in the CRM.
In the end, thanks to our in-house team and our project partners, we were able to simultaneously tackle these challenges and successfully launch the site with the new architecture fully in place.
A bright future ahead...
At Unlikely.Technology, we care about the long term success and satisfaction of our clients. That’s why we follow up with them even after a project is completed.
To this day, Ysé continues to consult us whenever they require feedback or run into issues. We continue to maintain and optimize the codebase of their site, and develop new features for them.
Our clients don’t come to us for one-off projects—they share our preference for long-term relationships based on trust.
After the successful completion of the project for Ysé, our technology agency is excited to keep creating bespoke digital experiences for brands in the future.