Case Study: Redefining Luxury Fragrance Ecommerce With a High-Performance Shopify Upgrade

Initio Parfums Privés: Brand overview

Initio Parfums Privés (IPP) is a leader in the niche luxury fragrance market, renowned for transcending the rules of classical perfumery. The brand explores the psychological dimensions of scent, creating high-intensity, pheromone-like fragrances designed to trigger and amplify emotions.

Founded in France in 2015, this premium Parisian perfume house has amassed a cult following, with customers hailing the transformative nature of its functional fragrances.

IPP is now rapidly expanding its presence across Europe, the US and the Middle East. It has a flagship store in Paris, and can be found in 900 retail locations globally.

Project objectives

IPP was seeking to elevate the frontend experience of its ecommerce website – creating a distinctive, highly immersive online destination that mirrors the captivating in-store experience of its boutiques.

With bold, statement-making concept designs produced by French design agency Source.paris, the IPP team engaged Swanky to develop these on the Shopify platform. We set out to upgrade the DTC journey, blending striking visuals with cutting-edge development.

Another aim was to enable more efficient management of IPP’s multiple international stores.

Throughout the project, striking a balance between experience and usability was key. We wanted to deliver a deeply engaging digital experience for consumers, whilst meeting modern ecommerce standards and, crucially, not compromising site speed.

How Swanky helped

Framework upgrade: Migration to Swanky’s high-performance Shopify theme

We migrated IPP’s four international stores from their inflexible legacy theme to Swanky’s bespoke development framework, creating an enterprise-grade digital architecture.

This theme leverages Shopify 2.0 architecture, along with best-in-class tooling, advanced engineering and proven ecommerce best practice, to deliver flexible, high-speed, high-performance storefronts. As such, performance of the IPP site rivals that of headless builds, without leaving the Shopify Liquid ecosystem.

This 2.0 theme also gives the IPP team enhanced flexibility and ownership, making it much easier to maintain and edit a store without having to rely on development resources. You can read more about advantages like these in our article about the benefits of upgrading to Shopify 2.0.

Multi-store management solution

With Shopify’s Liquid architecture, codebases can quickly diverge when multiple storefronts exist, leading to duplication of work when managing stores, stability issues, and increased overheads.

Swanky’s proprietary multi-store management solution allows for localised content and functionality, including giving the IPP team the ability to deploy region-specific content and campaigns, whilst protecting the integrity of the core store codebase. This mitigates the complexity of multi-store management and greatly reduces development and maintenance overheads.

Island architecture for enhanced performance

Island architecture is a modern approach to website development that breaks pages into independent, interactive components that load only when needed. This optimises performance and reduces load times, even with high-resolution imagery and dynamic animated content.

We deployed this approach when building the IPP site, meaning that users experience a smooth, responsive journey that echoes the premium, elegant feel of the IPP brand.

Elevating product pages with animation

IPP’s product pages serve as an excellent example of innovation and creativity. They blend ecommerce functionality with immersive storytelling – using imagery, animations, copy and audio to evoke the mood of the fragrance in question.

This sensory-driven approach elevates the product presentation to feel more like a luxury editorial than a standard online shop – speaking directly to style-conscious consumers who value premium digital experiences.

View this product page.

We leveraged GSAP, a highly performant JavaScript animation framework, to help create these experiential product pages. GSAP enables fluid animations and seamless page transitions that bring the brand to life, creating an almost cinematic browsing experience. It delivers these benefits without sacrificing performance.

Bespoke fragrance launch landing pages

Alongside the core site build, we also developed two fully custom landing pages to promote IPP’s new product launches.

View this product launch landing page. 

These once again used video and animation to envelop end users into the IPP brand, whilst being engineered for high performance.

The results: DTC innovation without compromising site speed

The IPP site transforms the typical transactional ecommerce journey into an evocative, sensory experience – encapsulating the unique spirit of IPP and providing an elevated purchasing process for luxury fragrance enthusiasts.

Whilst an elevated, design-driven frontend often compromises site performance, the IPP site delivers the best of both. Rich, high-impact visuals combine with advanced technical architecture to deliver a deeply engaging and performant ecommerce store.

Speed Index (SI) measures how quickly content appears on your website. A lower score indicates faster visual loading, meaning users see content sooner. Site speed audits before and after launch of the IPP site revealed a 74% improvement in SI on the homepage (18.002s to 4.593s) and a 69% improvement on an example product page (9.059s to 2.848s) – two pages that feature a significant amount of dynamic content.

Despite the use of heavier visual content and increased complexity behind-the-scenes, this project actually resulted in improved site speed. Having a slick, fast-loading store reinforces IPP’s positioning as a premium, luxury retailer.

Upgrade your Shopify store with Swanky

As a Shopify Platinum Partner, Swanky specialises in building compelling digital experiences for international retailers. From beauty and cosmetics websites for IPP and 82°E, to online fashion stores for the likes of bond-eye swim and Olivia von Halle, we know what it takes to make a statement in luxury ecommerce.

To speak to our solutions team about any of the themes in this case study, including Swanky’s Shopify theme or international store management, please complete our enquiry form.