Flexible, API-First DAM a Perfect Fit for LuisaViaRoma

When it comes to its online presence, LuisaViaRoma is more custom-tailored than “off the rack.” That’s why this global fashion leader has invested in its own photo studios and developed most of its own software including applications for e-commerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other services. Cloudinary, which replaced LuisaViaRoma’s homegrown digital asset management (DAM), is a notable exception. And thanks to Cloudinary’s powerful APIs, it was easy for LuisaViaRoma to fully integrate with the various homegrown systems. Cloudinary now handles up to 50,000 assets per month with ease, streamlining its visual media workflow and improving process efficiency.

ABOUT

Carefully Curated Luxury

Founded in 1929 by Luisa Jaquin and Lido Panconesi with the opening of the eponymous concept store in Via Roma in Florence, LuisaViaRoma, also known as LVR, has evolved under the direction of the founders’ grandson, Andrea Panconesi. A visionary fashion buyer, Panconesi still holds the role of President of LuisaViaRoma.

Online since 1999, the iconic luxury fashion retailer LuisaViaRoma is beloved for its high-end fashion for both men and women, home decor, and lifestyle products – from Alexander McQueen to Tom Ford, Valentino, and Versace. Today, LuisaViaRoma’s website gets more than 4 million visits per month and online sales account for 90% of its sales.

THE CHALLENGE

Reaching the Limits of ‘Home-Stitched Solutions’

When LuisaViaRoma opened its doors to the world in 1999 with the launch of its e-commerce site, success soon followed. By the end of 2017, customers from more than 150 countries could easily buy the company’s beautifully curated designer products.

But while LuisaViaRoma stocks items from brands, artists, architects and designers – it was the first store in Europe to partner with Japan’s Kenzo – its tech stack was entirely designed, produced, and maintained in-house.

It was a successful strategy: online and mobile generated 98% of sales (equal to €146 million) in 2019, and in 2020 revenues were up 30%, to €190 million. Over the years the team had built a highly successful internal engine, including ERP functionality and all order fulfillment, for spinning up attractive, authentic, descriptive visual content online on both web and mobile, and saw no reason to replace this with any external tools.

However, its home-stitched solutions couldn’t do everything. LuisaViaRoma decided to break its internal development-only policy by introducing a local Italian software tool for image handling and Akamai Image Manager for image optimization. The result, says Director of Technology Andrea Paleni, was not a great fit: “We had a DAM solution, but it wasn’t meeting our needs and we knew we needed to make a change.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

API-First Approach Tames Complexity

When Paleni joined the company in 2020, image handling was wildly complex, involving FTP-ing of images between folders and drives and different teams trying to remember where and what things were before. He elaborates, “We had a ‘Rube Goldberg’ level of complexity, including having our pictures in three different places, some local and some in the cloud.”

LuisaViaRoma’s high aesthetic standards makes the visual media workflow even more onerous: “We are very, very picky about the quality of our pictures, both in their creation and delivery,” says Paleni. “We have a dozen different studios, and we shoot everything. Even if a brand gives us some sample images at the beginning of the season, we still shoot our own photography.”

“In the fashion industry, you have to work on not just shape, but color and size. Every shape needs to be shot in every color and we have approximately 100,000 of these combinations of model and color. And every item has at least six or seven pictures, so we need to be able to quickly process at least 50,000 different pictures every month, explains Paleni.

A different DAM was needed — but given that introducing external tech had not gone well the first time, this time had to be different. The search for a DAM that was more flexible, integrable, and fit for purpose led Paleni’s team to replace the previous two systems with Cloudinary. “Ultimately,” Paleni says, “swapping out Cloudinary for both vendors’ solutions was a great chance to consolidate and improve several image processes in parallel.”

Cloudinary’s flexible, API-first approach meant it was able to fit into the firm’s proprietary tech stack and deliver unique image transformations, without disturbing anything. “We’d tried bending an already-made solution into our totally unique environment and it just didn’t work. The customization effort was unbearable,” he continues.

THE RESULTS

Faster, Smoother Workflow From Photoshoot to Web

Paleni — who manages a team of 30, including a four-person system integration team responsible for managing Cloudinary integrations — now says Cloudinary is effectively the single source of image truth at the brand.

This has led to considerable cost- and resource-savings. With Cloudinary, LuisaViaRoma has transformed a hugely labor-intensive process into one that can be done faster, more accurately, and still adhere to the company’s high aesthetic standards.

LuisaViaRoma is now able to effectively manage hundreds of thousands of high-quality images per year. All the complexity in its prior visual media lifecycle is now a streamlined photoshoot-to-web workflow, from image upload and transformation to delivery. “This speeds up our processes a lot, and our creatives are saving a lot of time as a result,” Paleni confirms.

What’s next?

On the back of its success so far, Paleni’s team is now turning to Cloudinary’s video and AI capabilities: “We did A/B testing with product videos and saw an uplift in terms of conversions,” he says. “We decided to move ahead — but what’s so interesting about Cloudinary is we can easily monitor the cost of any change, so we already had clear forecasts of all potential video costs in advance so didn’t have to make a big investment to get started. With AI, we are going to do the same; start small in Cloudinary, and then grow as the business grows to support it.”

LuisaViaRoma’s partnership with Cloudinary means it is now significantly faster and less expensive for this stylish brand to deliver beautiful experiences to online customers that compare to those in its Rome and Manhattan emporiums.