Global Fashion Company 
Paul Smith Tailors a Bright, Headless Future

Distinctive fashion retailer Paul Smith’s recent move to a headless e-commerce architecture based on MACH (micro services, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless) principles put Cloudinary at the center of its global ambitions. The strategic move to Cloudinary is automating and optimizing new and efficient approaches to the way Paul Smith handles its vast library of high quality fashion imagery, and sells online.

ABOUT

Design Leadership Spanning 50 Years

In 2020, Paul Smith celebrated 50 years of independent design success. Founded in 1970 in a small British city, Paul Smith is today a world-famous style icon known for its distinctive tailoring and fluorescent pink flagship store in Los Angeles.

Now active across 60 countries and more than 130 shops, industry-leading department stores, airports, and online, the company prides itself on using traditional techniques to make high-quality, tailored clothing for men and women. Key to its highly successful business model: seamless cooperation with its global business partner and franchisee network.

THE CHALLENGE

A Need for MACH-Based Working

Its website has always been central to the Paul Smith brand, but during the COVID-19 global pandemic, online sales peaked at 40%. As the world emerged from lockdown, the brand’s internal IT leadership decided that it could achieve even greater success by moving to a fully modern, composable, and headless architecture known as MACH. According to its Head of Digital Hannah Bennett,“We started learning about and digging into headless pre-pandemic, as we saw great potential about what it could give a customer in terms of not only site speed but flexibility of content.”

On the back end, a new MACH architecture stood to offer a range of operational benefits, such as enabling a best of breed strategy and increasing the company’ so overall agility.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Ease, Efficiency, and Cost Savings

At the heart of the updated Paul Smith architecture is Cloudinary’s headless DAM, Storyblok’s CMS, and Adobe Commerce.

Paul Smith initially adopted Cloudinary to help expand the digital offering for its wholesale business. Cloudinary’s DAM immediately transformed what once was a tedious manual process into a faster, more efficient way to showcase the company’s collection and optimized the way it managed visual media with B2B partners.

That early investment in Cloudinary paid off greatly when Paul Smith’s robust internal B2B website was easily extended to provide a wholesale channel to aid partners during the pandemic.

“Today we use Cloudinary in so many ways,” says Web Development Manager Nish Patel. “We’ve built an interface that lets us dynamically create collections that third party vendors and suppliers can download. Cloudinary’s close integration with both Adobe Commerce and the new Storyblok CMS lets us easily process a number of custom workflows we’ve set up, as well as giving us an efficient backup for past season images created for particular campaigns.”

Unsurprisingly, digital asset management is a key issue for a company that wants to release four collections a year, stresses Bennett. “As a luxury designer brand, we have to manage and retain a huge number of pictures—not only for our own retail, but for our big wholesale business. We want to create imagery in a streamlined way where we avoid duplication and make it as easy as possible for wholesale customers to work with us.”

Cloudinary is the lynchpin of a digital image handling process that connects the whole Paul Smith creative team — everyone from photography to marketing. Moving all clothing images around used to be a laborious task. But using Cloudinary has massively reduced the overhead associated with uploading imagery while ensuring consistency. For example, the creative team uses Cloudinary to enable seamless image handling using a naming match that automatically assigns a SKU in Adobe Commerce.

For Patel, the breakthrough with Cloudinary is its API-first approach: “Once we’ve ingested something into our database, then we can do anything with that data — be that changing transformations, exposing it into CSVs, or putting it into PDFs. So we’ve got a really clever API-based mechanism now, which Cloudinary has allowed us to do with ease.”

THE RESULTS

Easier, Faster, More Dynamic Media Experiences Lead to Stronger Engagement and Increased Sales

Even before launching its official headless strategy, Paul Smith realized significant savings with Cloudinary’s DAM. For example, the company now spends at least 40% less time on image management. A more recent benefit has been using Cloudinary to add more video to the sales mix.

“When we added video to the product page, we started to see a strong level of engagement conversion with video over straight images,” explains Bennett.

Patel adds, “And because Cloudinary gives us the flexibility to adjust the sizes we want to put in between the images and any transformation, we can set the size needed to make it retina-friendly and just pass those values as a URL, dynamically. ”The bottom line is that Cloudinary has become an indispensable part of the fabric of Paul Smith’s web architecture and visual media workflow. “In all honesty, I don’t know a world without Cloudinary or its DAM solution now,” concludes Bennett.