MATCHESFASHION Pivots to eCommerce for Long-Term Success with Contentful

Based in London but operating across the world, clothing retailer MATCHESFASHION is known for its luxury men and women’s attire as well as home goods. It works with more than 600 designers to offer high-end products.

Despite having 3 stores scattered across London, 95% of its revenue comes from ecommerce that spreads out across 176 countries.

Even before the pandemic arrived, MATCHESFASHION was already working on elevating their marketing campaigns on its website but also mobile app. Catering to 176 markets is a complex effort because there are myriad specifics involved such as language, culture, currency, tax jurisdictions, etc.

“Since Covid-19, we’ve had to be more agile,” said Chloe Doncieux, senior product manager, “and make more banners than ever before to drive more traffic and sales. Contentful has been a real blessing.”

A CMS for an international brand

When MATCHESFASHION started its search for a new content management system, the company’s most vital necessity was a platform that would allow marketing to operate with more agility. Before, marketers were tied to their reliance on their tech coworkers, as well as by the lengthy process for building new pieces of content – from a campaign banner and new article to regular weekly updates to the home page.

MATCHESFASHION put Contentful to work for a project within its iOS shopping app. “We saw that Contentful was very easy to integrate with and build on,” said Chloe Doncieux, the senior product manager. This project led to the launch of a proof of concept, and MATCHESFASHION launched its first complete implementation of Contentful a couple of months later.

“It was quite an ambitious schedule,” added Chloe, “a quick turnaround and super-smooth.” After just 7 days of training on the content management system, marketers could get to work on their own without the need to harass their engineering colleagues. “The feedback was tremendous,” exclaimed Chloe, “and it was a huge step for us.”

The difference has been unquantifiable. “Contentful has been game-changing for MATCHESFASHION,” said Elizabeth Calow, its trading and campaigns manager. “It has allowed us to be more flexible and reactive than ever before with our marketing content, and has streamlined processes for multiple teams across the business. 

“The tool is so easy to use once you get started and as a campaign manager it has given me real control over my campaigns.”

Since replatforming to Contentful, MATCHESFASHION can manage a lot more marketing campaigns across its sites and apps. Messaging to customers stays consistent, as content is fed to all touchpoints from a single source.

“Contentful is very easy to integrate with,” said Chloe, “super-flexible and lets us build custom components on top of the native UI. We were able to meet all our requirements in a record time frame.”

The creatives are able to use templates to localize across all their markets as well as publish content in the right languages and prices in the right currency.

“Collaboration between marketers, designers, editors and translators has improved,” said Chloe. This has saved MATCHESFASHION a lot of time since its Contentful move. In the past publishing content took the brand 15 people to manage it. Now it’s just one person. “That’s especially handy when we launch outside of office hours,” said Chloe.

In addition, the switch to Contentful also freed up developer time. Since the switch, one senior developer has been redeployed from marketing support to new projects. And MATCHESFASHION hopes that future Contentful iterations can free up another two more developers to refocus their work.

“Contentful strikes a lovely balance between giving us flexibility to customise things unique to our business while also allowing us to get something up and running off the shelf quickly and not having to reinvent the wheel,” said Dan Knight, its CTO. “Their commercials are sensible and flexible as well which is great.”

Future growth

MATCHESFASHION has truly squeezed the most out of the flexibility of Contentful. Already they have constructed custom user interface components to achieve a number of business needs, including an app to render all marketing activity set up in Contentful. “It’s all automated,” said Chloe. “So there’s no need to manually create emails anymore.”

And for the future? “We’re listening to our users asking for more,” added Chloe. “We have many more implementations planned.”

Contentful also provides tech support. “They were such a pleasure to work with,” added Chloe. “The team is professional, dedicated and fun to work with. They were always available while we were integrating, providing help and advice on how to best architect the content platform, both on the commercial side and on the technical side.”

One of MATCHESFASHION’s software engineers spoke about their experience. “What I like about working with Contentful is having extensive docs and expansive API,” said Manuel Cheta, senior software engineer. “The CMS is easy to use and the Delivery API is fast. On top of this, having the ability to extend functionality with extensions and apps makes the experience much more enjoyable.”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful specialists. Contact us to see how we can work together.