Case Study: A New Shopify Custom Design For This International Fashion Swimwear Brand

TL;DR

• We designed and built a bespoke Shopify 2.0 site for fashion swimwear brand bond-eye swim, part of The Bond-Eye Australia Group.
• The website design perfectly encapsulates the essence of bond-eye swim, enveloping users into the brand and its values.
• Custom development on this project included building a ‘fit guide’ and ‘find your set’ mix and match functionality, allowing customers to assemble a swim ensemble that suits their tastes.
• The site leverages our multi-store codebase solution to enable rapid deployment of the new codebase and functionality across the group’s three other brands, and to streamline multi-store code management thereafter.

Client overview: The Bond-Eye Australia Group

Headquartered in Sydney, The Bond-Eye Australia Group is an internationally recognised swimwear group. It comprises four globally distributed brands: bond-eye swim, Sea Level Australia, Artesands, and NipTuck Swim.

The Group has developed strong retail partnerships throughout Australia, New Zealand and North America, with a growing presence in Europe.

This case study focuses on our work with bond-eye swim. The brand is known for its bold, statement-making swimwear pieces, each designed with intention for the stylish and discerning modern woman.

Challenges & project scope

When The Bond-Eye Australia Group first engaged Swanky, it was already leveraging Shopify as its group-wide ecommerce platform, with seven stores across its four brands.

However, the store architecture was outdated, and implementing campaign landing pages or new apps was becoming problematic due to the age of the theme being used.

Furthermore, the theme was proving restrictive in how impactfully it allowed the brand’s high-quality campaign imagery to be displayed.

We were tasked with refreshing the look and feel of the bond-eye swim site, leveraging elements such as colour, font, UI styling and spacing to create an upgraded aesthetic that better conveyed the brand’s philosophy to consumers.

Alongside this Shopify custom design, the project scope included re-theming the bond-eye swim store with a theme compatible with Shopify Online Store 2.0. This would unlock a better experience for the bond-eye swim team through enhanced flexibility and agility, as well as providing a richer, more compelling experience for the brand’s customers. You can read more about these advantages in our article about the benefits of upgrading to Shopify Online Store 2.0.

Ultimately, we wanted to create a more performant and reliable ecommerce infrastructure, with enhanced on-site functionality and optimised UX, to better support the entire brand group through international growth.

What we did

Our multidisciplinary ecommerce experts from our UK and Australian teams collaborated to realise these goals and bring the new vision for bond-eye swim to life.

1. New Shopify custom design

We crafted a beautiful Shopify custom design for bond-eye swim’s new site, with a look and feel that portrays the brand and its values to shoppers at a glance.

When choosing a colour palette, our design team took inspiration from bond-eye’s stunning photography collection. We opted for accent colours that complement the imagery’s natural, beachy tones and instantly transport shoppers to the Australian coastline on a warm summer’s day.

The lower case titles, menu headers and button text are a nod to the relaxed, free-spirited nature of the bond-eye swim brand, whilst conveying its modern approach to swimwear design.

The use of strokes, as seen in the screenshot below, adds further visual interest whilst giving the site a fashion-forward feeling.

Meanwhile, the simple and clean layout reflects the brand’s ethical approach to production and its transparency around sustainability.

Finally, the new design affords plenty of real estate to lifestyle imagery, with large image sections and use of negative space making the excellent ecommerce photography shine.

Crucially, this Shopify store design can be easily adapted to suit Bond-Eye Australia Group’s other brands, without additional code customisation. It is flexible enough to meet the different target market requirements of each brand in terms of UI expectations, look and feel, accessibility and compliance.

2. Shopify 2.0 upgrade using the Swanky Theme

We upgraded the bond-eye swim store to Shopify Online Store 2.0, leveraging our proprietary codebase, the ‘Swanky Theme’.

More than simply a Shopify theme, this is a custom development framework designed to enable the rapid development of fully bespoke, high-speed, conversion-optimised storefronts. It includes components such as:

• a custom codebase (including key storefront features like Products, Collections, Pages, Cart and Blog, as well as common sections for media and rich text);
• best-of-breed developer tooling;
• a design template with pre-built UI components employing ecommerce best practices; and
• an email development framework, to enable rapid customisation of transactional emails.

3. Development of custom website features

Fit guide

We developed a custom fit guide to help shoppers better understand the features of bond-eye’s different swimwear styles and thus identify the right fit for their bodies.

Users can select a style from the carousel and then view key details about that fit, including notes on coverage and support. They can also see photos of the selected style on two different models. 

This fit guide should prove to be a helpful resource for shoppers – one that we hope will boost users’ confidence in their purchase decisions and increase conversion rate amongst those who interact with it. Whilst consumers that are new to the brand may initially be cautious of purchasing unsized products, the guide helps them understand that bond-eye’s swimwear pieces work well across all body shapes because of the stretch and flexibility of the innovative Authentic Crinkle™ fabric.

It also demonstrates bond-eye swim’s commitment to helping its customers find the right product for them – a sentiment that will help to nurture long-term relationships and encourage brand advocacy. 

Find your set

Inspired by a Barbie costume designer app from childhood, the bond-eye swim team were excited to provide a similar experience for shoppers on their website. They wanted to create a sense of fun with an interactive outfit finder, adding an element of gamification to product discovery.

With this in mind, our developers built bespoke ‘find your set’ functionality for product pages, providing shoppers with a dynamic experience to help choose the perfect swimwear outfit.

Users can click through different options for tops and bottoms in the same colour group, with price details for the selected combination instantly appearing in a cart preview.

As well as the added fun for website users, this mix and match feature streamlines the path to purchase for shoppers, allowing them to explore different style options from a single product page. Enabling easy product discovery and simplifying the online shopping experience like this is a great way to increase purchase conversions.

4. Streamlining multi-store management within & across brands

We deployed our innovative multi-store codebase solution, giving the team the ability to easily roll out and maintain code across multiple stores in The Bond-Eye Australia Group.

Firstly, the solution will simplify management of international expansion stores within each brand, (e.g. reducing complexity and protecting the codebase across bond-eye swim’s US and Australian stores).

It will also allow for the rapid implementation of re-themed stores for Sea Level, Niptuck, and Artesands, without the overheads traditionally associated with building a store from scratch.

What’s next for The Bond-Eye Australia Group & Swanky?

Following the successful launch of bond-eye swim’s new Shopify store, the new codebase and functionality will be rolled out and repurposed across The Bond-Eye Australia Group, giving all four brands enhanced functionality, an optimised UX and a more performant codebase to scale over the coming years.

We look forward to continuing our partnership with the group, working to accelerate international growth across bond-eye swim, Sea Level, Artesands and Niptuck.

Elevate your ecommerce experience with a custom Shopify website design

Our global team of ecommerce experts design, build and optimise beautiful Shopify Plus fashion stores that captivate and convert. With a portfolio including the likes of luxury loungewear retailer Olivia von Halle and premium occasionwear label Needle & Thread, we know what it takes to make a statement in the fashion ecommerce space.

Reach out to our team today to find out how we can upgrade your website’s aesthetic with a Shopify custom design.