Introduction
Matches Fashion is a well-established retailer, known for its sophisticated curation of luxury men’s and women’s clothing and home goods from more than 650 designers. While the company started more than 30 years ago as a bricks-and-mortar business, today it derives 95 percent of its revenue from online sales.
Long before the pandemic, Matches Fashion was working to step up marketing campaigns, both on its websites and its mobile apps. Marketing is a complex effort for the company, which ships to customers in 176 different countries, who pay in many different currencies. The company’s sites and apps are available in four languages.
A CMS for a global retailer
When Matches Fashion began its search for a new CMS in 2019, the company’s overarching need was for a content platform that would let marketing operate in a more agile way. Marketers were slowed down by their reliance on their technical colleagues, and by the lengthy process for building any new piece of content, whether it was the weekly-refreshed home page, a new article or a campaign banner.
Matches Fashion had already begun using Contentful for a project within its iOS shopping app. “We saw that Contentful was very easy to integrate with and build on,” says Chloe Doncieux, the senior product manager and Contentful lead at Matches Fashion. That initial project encouraged Matches Fashion to launch a proof of concept in January 2020, and the company launched its first complete implementation of Contentful in early May 2020.
“It was quite an ambitious schedule and a quick and super-smooth turnaround,” shared Chloe
Within a week of training on Contentful, marketers were able to work independently of their engineering colleagues, and “the feedback was tremendous, and it was a huge step for us,” added Chloe.
“Contentful has been game-changing for Matches Fashion. It has allowed us to be more flexible and reactive than ever before with our marketing content, and has streamlined processes for multiple teams across the business. The tool is so easy to use once you get started and as a campaign manager it has given me real control over my campaigns,” said Elizabeth Calow, trading and campaigns manager.
Since its implementation, Matches Fashion has been able to run many more marketing campaigns across its websites and mobile apps. Messaging to customers stays consistent, as content is fed to all touchpoints from a single source.
Just as important for a company that operates globally, marketing teams are able to use templates to localize for all their markets, publishing content in appropriate languages and prices in the correct currencies.
“Collaboration between marketers, designers, editors and translators has improved,” says Chloe. And Matches Fashion has saved a lot of time since moving over to Contentful. Where the old publishing process required 15 people to manage, one person can now take care of it all. “That’s especially handy when we launch outside of office hours,” Chloe said.
The company has saved developer time, too. Since Contentful implementation, one full-time senior developer has been redeployed from marketing support to new projects, and Matches Fashion expects future Contentful iterations will allow two more full-time developers to shift their focus to new work.
Building for future growth
Matches Fashion has taken full advantage of Contentful’s flexibility. The company has built a couple of custom user interface components to meet specific business needs, as well as an app to visually render all the marketing activity that’s been set up in Contentful, linking it to a Slack bot so all stakeholders can stay current with upcoming marketing campaigns. “It’s all automated, so there’s no need to manually create emails anymore,” Chloe said.
Marketing teams are looking forward to future Contentful implementations. “We’re listening to our users asking for more,” said Chloe. “We have many more implementations planned.”
The Matches Fashion technical team was delighted with the Contentful support engineers. “They were such a pleasure to work with,” Chloe said. “The team is professional, dedicated and fun to work with. They were always available while we were integrating, providing help and advice on how to best architect the content platform, both on the commercial side and on the technical side.”
