One of the pioneers of the home try-on model within the clothing industry, Trunk Club is a personalized men and women’s clothing service that comes out of Illinois.
As its name suggests, each customer connects with a styling specialist who curates clothing for a box (or better, trunk). Then it is shipped to the customer, where they can either decide to keep the clothes or send individual items back.
When Trunk Club wanted to upgrade its content management system, they took a lesson in what they’re stylists recommend to customers and rather than just go with a normal nondescript digital solution, they built something entirely new and fresh.
And they chose Contentful to lie at the core of their new digital experience.
Publish everywhere
As part of the Nordstrom chain, the expectation is first-quality online experiences – whether shoppers are visiting from their Mac or their Android phone.
Pre-Contentful days, Trunk Club spent plenty of time working on ensuring the consistency of its content across all of its devices.
What they did was set up multiple content management systems, including one for mobile. “The content worked relatively well for the purpose it was built,” said Justin Hughes, VP of product development and design. “To be featured on the website, but not much beside that. As a result, the team introduced a different CMS to manage mobile content once the mobile apps were launched.
“The two CMSes did not sync in any way, so a group of editors was tasked with maintaining and editing content across these platforms.”
Renovating its online presence, Trunk Club found in Contentful a way to eliminate these redundancies one and for all. Now its creatives have a nice and easy-to-use Content Editor. And its devs can then take the text and translate it into JSON using a RESTful API to display across apps for both web and mobile. Such simplicity.
The marketing team, now equipped with a single content repository, can now put all their effort into designing quality content fit for each screen – instead of jumping between different content management platforms.
Trunk Club incorporated Contentful across all of its tech stacks to tighten up its control and build a singular place for content. Devs and creatives of Trunk Club got together to construct a content data model, in which they built fields for more long-term web descriptions in addition to more short-form mobile descriptions.
Keeping up with the …
For many out there, like me, it’s difficult to keep up with the latest fashion. And it can be equally as difficult for brands to keep the pace. When there is a new look that explodes on the catwalk or, more likely nowadays, when a celebrity puts something on their Instagram feed, it’s critical for brands like Trunk Club to stay up to date with the coming demand as well as latest advice.
Pre-Contentful, the dev team was deployed each time there is a change, update, or edit to the brand’s content – creating a double-edged problem of creating bottlenecks for writers and editors as well as distracting attention from devs. “Eventually, the engineering team decided that Contentful could be used to relieve them of the burden of publishing content updates,” added Justin.
Trunk Club integrated it into both the staging and production versions of every app. Afterwards, they then used webhooks to integrate Contentful into Slack.
By making a simple command in the relevant channel, the marketing team is able to carry out deploys at any time. “Our marketing team can craft, test, and optimize everything they write for every device,” said Justin.
“The ability to produce and deliver content that provides sartorial advice and personalized recommendations is essential to the company,” added Justin. “Our content provides Trunk Club with a way to maintain authority in the styling domain.”
Today, Contentful is key to Trunk Club’s successful marketing strategy.
PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful integrators. Contact us to see how we can work together.
