Levi’s Gives Cloudinary a Spin for Virtual Showroom

ABOUT

Levi’s

Levi’s was caught in a bind as the wholesalers that distribute its footwear and accessories were impacted by budget constraints and stay-at-home orders stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. This combination of factors made it impossible for the wholesalers to visit Levi’s showrooms, explore new collections, and decide what products they wanted to carry and sell in the coming season. Working with Cloudinary and Geos Consult, Levi’s successfully developed a virtual showroom that provided interactive product galleries with detailed 360-degree images and videos to showcase the products, making the experience as close to real as possible. The new user-friendly application integrated easily with other back-end systems and provided B2B sales opportunities for those unable to travel to physical showrooms.

Levi’s Footwear & Accessories is a division of Levi Strauss & Co. that focuses on these items, as well as wholesale distribution. Levi Strauss & Co. is one of the world’s largest brand-name apparel companies and a global leader in jeanswear. The company designs and markets jeans, casual wear, and related accessories for men, women, and children under Levi’s®, Dockers®, Signature by Levi Strauss & Co.™, and Denizen® brands. Its products are sold in more than 110 countries worldwide through a combination of chain retailers, department stores, online sites, and a global footprint of approximately 3,200 retail stores and shop-in-shops.

THE CHALLENGE

Developing Visual Experiences for B2B Commerce

The Levi’s Footwear & Accessories division was seeking alternative channels to reach its wholesale distributors, such as Farfetch, since many of them were facing budget and travel constraints that prevented them from visiting showrooms in person. But an online option couldn’t be just a run-of-the-mill e-commerce website.

Levi’s anticipated that its wholesalers would visit this virtual showroom to explore and buy products for seasonal collections. The platform would have to be capable of handling continuous updates, including upload of 40,000 new images each season, and be able to display the media quickly and efficiently to deliver an optimal user experience. The virtual showroom also would need to be easy to manage, and seamlessly integrate with existing e-commerce and customer resource management platforms, as well as other business and reporting tools.

Levi’s began working with Geos Consult, an IT consulting firm, to develop a custom solution. The marketplace was built on a digital asset management (DAM) platform from Geos Consult called G-image, which leverages Cloudinary behind the scenes for all image and video management and processing.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Streamlining Management and Optimizing Experiences

Designed specifically for the fashion industry, G-image relies on Cloudinary to streamline image and video management, and optimize delivery, regardless of device, viewport, or bandwidth. It quickly became a preferred solution for Levi’s because other content delivery networks (CDNs) did not offer the type of image optimization or integrations the company sought. The Levi’s team uploads original images of different collections directly to G-image, which uses Azure for storage.

The images are well categorized, using a standard naming convention that helps identify the products and other key features. Then through Cloudinary, the images can be transformed and manipulated for optimal use across different applications within the company, including the B2B platform, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and other applications.

Levi’s design team then uses Cloudinary to automatically transcode images to the most efficient format based on the content and the viewing browser, adjust the compression quality, and adapt the resolution to fit any viewport. Doing so ensures that individual images, as well as the product galleries, load fast and in a responsive manner.

Managing videos follows much the same process, leveraging Cloudinary’s automation and customizable video player for a smooth video streaming experience in the virtual showroom.

THE RESULTS

Agility and Innovation to Adapt to Changing Times

Levi’s continues to leverage the combination of G-image and Cloudinary for adopting new trends and technologies. The introduction of 360 spinners, for example, enabled wholesalers to virtually interact with products and evaluate them from different angles.

Creating a 360-degree spin set requires 25 images of each product all named and then numbered correctly so they can be rendered in the right order. Without Cloudinary’s dynamic manipulation capabilities, Levi’s could not have implemented this kind of real-life view of its products in due course. With Cloudinary, it takes only about one hour to prepare and activate the spinner image in the virtual showroom.