Creating an immersive showroom in six weeks

From its striped sweaters to banana and cherry print T-shirts, GANNI, the Scandinavian street-style brand has been making waves across the fashion industry as it grew to become a designer label which every follow-worthy Instagrammer was wearing. In a world that stays at home, the brand needed to reinvent how it connected with its B2B buyers by embracing a digital-only approach. Thanks to our previous collaboration together during which our team of experts redesigned the brand’s website in six week’s time, GANNI asked us to help them design and build a lookbook and digital showroom for their wholesale buyers together with MOON.

Although the aim was to present the brand’s newest collection to their B2B buyers, we wanted to take it a step further and create an immersive experience which incorporates some playful elements that reflect GANNI’s brand personality and make the user smile. Therefore, together with GANNI and MOON, we came up with the idea of recreating Ditte’s, GANNI’s Creative Director, desktop and transform it into an immersive digital showroom experience.

The core of the showroom experience was the lookbook which enabled buyers to have a 360-degree view of each style. Each selected product would prompt multiple pop-ups of both photos and videos that zoom in and out to demonstrate the fit, shape and texture of the garment. To keep the navigation process simple and intuitive, users could use the arrows on their keyboard to flip through the various product offerings and press “escape” to close all of the open windows. Making it easy to navigate through the brand’s various product offerings in a surprising and engaging way.

However, beyond the lookbook folder which showcased the newest styles in addition to styling suggestions and behind-the-scenes images from the photoshoot, Ditte’s desktop also included a virtual fitting room feature which prompted users to take a photo of themselves and play dress up with a few signature styles from the collection. Once the look was finalised, users could save and download their creations. This enabled buyers to visualise and style each item to their liking from the comfort of their homes.

Lastly, we included a few small but fun digital components to set the mood for buyers around the world. So from a music player which played layback and lively music to a folder which opened the hampsterdance GIF and song as a fun 90’s reference; and a “private” folder with a personal letter from Ditte introducing this year’s collection and images showing the making of the collection, our team incorporated these elements to ensure this felt like an experience rather than just business.

Our team of experts had six weeks to build and code a digital showroom for GANNI. Given this tight timeframe, we opted to use a customisable blank slate Netlify CMS which enabled fast and flexible development via a friendly user interface. Meaning we were able to deploy it quickly and GANNI employees could also easily work with it. In addition, we used Contentful for media hosting purposes. This enabled us to construct a small-scale coherent self-contained application.

In six weeks time, together with GANNI and MOON, we created and built a digital showroom that enabled 600 buyers to discover a more personal side to the fashion brand, browse the newest collection and save any items they wish to buy.

Nicolaj Reffstrup, GANNI’s founder comments “As COVID-19 hit, we realised that we had to radically rethink our approach to B2B sales. However, we needed to ensure that the project was 100% on-brand, totally immersive, digitally savvy and added value to our partners. We also wanted to combine the digital experience with playful and physical elements such as a handmade wine glass or a curated notebook with fabric swatches, creating tactility. The result was a completely tailored digital platform with an interesting brand narrative and content that was multi-layer. We were able to offer a high level of service to our wholesale partners as well as creating something that felt super personal in the shape of Ditte’s actual desktop.”

However, we’re just getting started. We are currently working on elevating the original concept by enabling e-commerce features in addition to adding more playfulness. As the world becomes more and more digital, GANNI is future-proofing its brand by catering to all of its customers in a digital manner.