Supermodel Gigi Hadid chose Black & Black to launch her luxury cashmere brand, Guest In Residence, on Shopify Plus.
Being one of the most famous people on the planet with 77 million followers on Instagram alone - the launch of her brand would naturally generate a huge amount of interest. The Guest in Residence team knew they had to have a best-in-class ecommerce website that delivered a gorgeous & frictionless user-experience design coupled with perfect development execution quality.
The resulting website is a digital manifestation of Guest in Residence’s unique engaging brand aesthetic and heirloom built to last quality.
With regards to business performance the store has performed incredibly well since launch in 2022. Year-over-year from 2022 to 2023 we saw a 129% increase in conversion rate and a 110% increase in total sales from October to December (YoY).
More economical than headless yet just as performant.
For Guest in Residence we initially considered a headless technology stack to achieve their goals of an extremely fast, robust and flexible store. However, with the launch of Shopify 2.0 upgrades, Black & Black felt confident that Guest in Residence could achieve incredible site speed, performance, frontend UX customization and a flexible content management without having to go the headless route and sticking with Shopify 2.0 monolithic throughout. In addition, as the site is built using Shopify’s monolithic architecture, maintenance cost for Guest in Residence is considerably lower than running than what it would cost to run a headless site.
Guest in Residence’s brand identity employs a number of fonts, font weights and sizes to acheive their unique and engaging brand aesthetic feel. We had to build an incredibly flexible digital style guide within Shopify that gave the brand team the flexibility to establish an adaptable visual identity across the platform without the need for future development. The use of many fonts created a number of challenges in that we had to create many flexible Shopify sections that were fully responsive and seamlessly scalable across all mobile and desktop devices.
