Fluid (@Fluid) collaborated with Lipman and Diane von Furstenberg to create a tweet-infused online catalog for DVF’s fall collection. You can experience the interactive catalog here.

Rich interactivity + iPad / iPhone compatibility.

The online catalog is richly interactive but coded so that it can be fully experienced on the iPad / iPhone. The video player, interactive carousels and screen transitions are all HTML5, delivering a great shopping experience and letting DVF reach its audience on the all the devices that matter.

Fully twitter-enabled catalog experience.

To put it mildly, Diane von Furstenberg is an avid twitterer (<@InsideDVF>) and her posts are addictive. The catalog is built around her most iconic statements – like “I always wanted to live a man’s life in a woman’s body” – and letting users retweet her latest posts directly from within the catalog.

Most interesting is that each product has it’s own hashtag – e.g. #jane bolero – encouraging users to tweet out what they like at a product level (they can tweet/share/like the catalog as a whole as well). The result is product-specific tweets with unique bit.ly links to each product detail page that help track the consumer’s path through the social shopping funnel and the traffic driven from their shares, likes & tweets.

*Thank you* to the people behind the “people’s choice” Adweek Buzz Award! And special thanks to our great clients at Rachel Roy and the Jones Apparel Group. We’re thrilled to get this recognition for the facebook pop-up store for Rachel Roy!

(more on the facebook fan shop and why it worked here)

Prior to the change we did a survey. We wanted to know the degree to which people were getting involved with brands on Facebook. Are fans in it for the arm candy or are they locked in long-term? Is all of this brand fanning one big booty call?

The results: 35.3% described their relationship with brand pages as Love ‘em and Leave ‘em.

The rest of the results…
29.4% Married: I work for the brand, product or company
17.6% Arm candy: I fan a brand so people will know I’m affiliated with it
11.8% Booty call: I’ll visit every once and a while
5.9% NA: I’ve never fanned a brand, company or product
0% Hot and Heavy: I’m actively involved & engaged with the fan page

The great news? This is changing. Brands are giving fans a reason to return. One of the best reasons to return as I see it? Shopping.

Our FanShop has proven it. And kudos to Levi’s for being the first to bring Facebook’s liking social plug-in to life with gusto. The media implications of this are impressive. When my “like” of 501 Jeans meets my wall meets Vitrue’s estimate of FB page wall click through rates at 6.5% we have another measure of ROI in social media. Boom.

I am a fan of liking content. And of having this liking explode outside of the confines of Facebook. But I miss fans of brands. A “Fan” is clear cut and cheering for you. Is a “liker” really going to paint their face and take a stand on behalf of your brand?

Although our Love ‘em and Leave ‘em fans likely weren’t doing that anyway.

Now we shall all see if “Likes” are enough to get us into a long-term relationship. I’m optimistic about the prospects.

Cheers,
Amy

Please note: Our survey was informal and distributed via social media.

Fluid Experience’s Merchandiser component enables merchants to frequently update their site with fresh content without having to involve the IT department. Merchants simply upload content to the administrative tools, group them into a merchandiser and then deploy. The whole process takes a matter of minutes. The look and feel of the merchandiser is template based and can be configured with brand appropriate themes. This allows business users to add new content without worrying about veering off design. You can also customize the interaction your users experience, allowing them to navigate through banners with seamless cross-fading, scrolling or pagination. Our Merchandiser component can also contain shoppable lifestyle imagery and interactive SWFs for an extra degree of interactivity.

To learn more about implementing rotating banners on your site, contact support@fluidretail.com

When we think about great real world shopping experiences, there is a common theme to every flagship store and back alley pop-up shop: excellent product presentation. In the offline world, it’s guaranteed that there will be a real live product to pick up, inspect and share. You need only watch shoppers in a average apparel store to see how picking up an item, holding it up and glancing in the mirror creates an emotional attachment.

This simple act is so basic in the offline world that it’s too easy to overlook when envisioning the online experience. While best practices dictate things like the Add to Cart button being above the fold and intuitive search and browse functionality, it’s important not to lose sight of the basics:

Outstanding product presentation is a ticket to the game. Without it, consumers are may look elsewhere for this emotional attachment.

Scene 7 was kind enough to validate this philosophy in their recent “What Shoppers Want” survey. The Cliff’s Notes version is this:  shoppers want rich, vivid product imagery and the ability to browse views and colors and zoom in with simple mouse over actions. Clicking is too much work.  They want to “go big” and inspect every last detail of the product with minimal effort,  just as they would in the offline world.

At Fluid, we designed Fluid Experience from the ground up to produce rich, easy-to-use product displays that are unparalleled in the e-commerce landscape. Almost as important, we made them incredibly simple to build and change so you can experiment and find out what delights your customers.

In the spirit of going big, we took a few minutes to put together a demo that does just that. Simple mouse movements change views and expose zoom. Plus you can click View Larger for even greater detail and zoom. We think you’ll agree that it’s difficult to go back to just an average product image.

Craftsman Custom delivers a premium experience for consumers to tailor a pro-quality tool storage solution to their specific needs and tastes. The experience leverages 3d visualization to deliver a blueprint-like experience that progressively builds into a photo-realistic vision of the consumer’s ideal product, all in real time.

The Sears Garage Planner experience is built on inspirations and “starting point” ideas. Consumers are presented with an interactive photo gallery of shoppable and customizable garage storage solutions. The experience is simultaneously inspirational and actionable, injecting the consumer with ideas and empowering them to make them their own.

Our team has a long history designing shopping experiences for customizable products, including …

• FunStamps (the first personalizable stamps offering)
• Timberland Boot Studio (custom footwear)
• Your Reebok (custom footwear) + facebook configurator
• Design Within Reach FLOR Designer (custom carpet configurator)
• Fine Stationery (card & stationery customizer)
• Vans Customs (custom footwear)

We’re fortunate to collaborate with such great brands to innovate new shopping experiences in such a nascent field. We’re proud to be among the first who have created configurators delivering consumers real-time visualization, product rotation, share-to-phone and integrated social sharing tools.

The business benefits of a better customization experience: 200%+ increase in sales, 16+ minute average consumer engagement on-site, spikes in sharing & heavy engagement with social media customization tools.

Some recent observations, field notes, and expectations looking forward:

• Before the “economic downturn” (or whatever it’s called now), Fluid was seeing RFPs for customization up approx 5-10x showing a sharp increase in interest across industries. The recession put most of those projects on hold.

• Those brands that continued forward became increasingly strategic around customization, seeing it as a brand and business building opportunity. In many cases increasing scope and decreasing timelines in an effort to get to market quickly with robust offerings (a differentiation/barrier strategy).

• Interestingly, over half of these brands are in verticals outside of footwear.

• Embedding up-sells in the customization experience has proven so effective that some retailers are pricing base models at-or-under cost and attaching costs per attribute selection (e.g. premium colors, extra set of laces, etc.).

• Providing the consumer with simple, intuitive social tools — both providing the ability to chat real-time with friends & ability to engage one’s facebook network without ever leaving the customization experience — has become a priority among most of our clients (and now considered a best practice within Fluid).

Finally, three predictions:

1. Customization experiences will take shape in ways that are more subtle and less overt – more about great digital shopping and less about “configurators” per se. This is what most consumers want. Thoughtful experiences that embed customization vs. customization being the main draw will help launch this consumer-driven approach to digital shopping into the mainstream.
2. Customization will make the notion of a crowd-sourced economy a reality. Champion and Keds are first movers (and got a lot of brand benefit as a result + some satisfaction at beating Nike to market I’m sure
3. Customizable shopping experiences will increasingly be deployed exclusively to social channels like facebook. Customizing something lends itself superbly to a community atmosphere – expect to see brands fully leveraging all that facebook has to offer in that regard.

While he steadfastly claims not to have had inside information, with Google naming a VP of Commerce today, kudos go out to our Chief Experience Officer, Andrew Sirotnik, for predicting this in a blog post several weeks ago.

Since Andrew’s post built an interesting case for the move, I won’t elaborate except to say it is clear the stakes are rising on ecommerce in general and, more specifically, distributed commerce, where consumers are able to interact with brands and products from wherever they spend their time. It will be interesting to see where things evolve from here.

Nice prediction, Andrew. What do you have for us next?

The pop-up store was live for 5 days only delivering fans a uniquely branded shopping experience around the limited edition jewelry collaboration plus one facebook-only exclusive item which sold out within the first 12 hours (all the items sold out completely before the 5 days were up). The insider event was a marketing success as well, increasing Rachel Roy’s fan base by 25% in the first day alone.

We had a fun time designing this: great brand + great clients + thoughtful use of social media = meaningful customer experience that delivers real value, makes them want to buy and love the brand more as a result.

Here are some thoughts from the strategy & design team on why it worked…

• Differentiated brand + shopping experience. There have been some research reports circulating lately that show consumers want to be able to shop on social channels. Importantly though, consumers do not want your ecommerce site pasted into facebook. They want a layered experience that blends a differentiated brand experience with awesome content (like the shareable photo & video gallery) with a great product experience.

• Not an “e-commerce” template. Fluid’s launch for Rachel Roy is built on a productized software-as-a-service solution (Fluid Social) but consumers would never know it. The technology is designed from the ground up to be easily customized and uniquely branded (proof coming in 2 weeks when we launch another one – stay tuned . Consumers and retailers hate templates and for good reason: nobody wants to shop someone who is indistinguishable from their competition. When you look at some of the templated “facebook lookbooks” out there that deliver an identical experience for athletic footwear as they do for womens fashion, it’s an easy prediction that consumers will devalue those brands that embrace generic sameness, especially in social media.

• Authentically social. We were surprised to see so many self-described “social shopping” implementations out there that completely lacked basic social functionality. Fluid integrated standard facebook “like” and “share” functionality throughout the entire experience, delivering users the social elements they expect. It makes for a great shopping experience to see that 90 other people “liked” the Petal Ring – far more meaningful in this context than product reviews.

• Limited to fans only. It’s impossible to overestimate how much consumers value insider status and benefits. As long as you are serving up real value – and avoiding exclusivity for exclusivity’s sake – your consumers will appreciate it, share more and have a stronger urge to buy.