New site improved site-wide conversion by 38% and mobile conversions by 60% 

Venroy is a boutique brand specializing in male beach resort wear inspired by the Australian beach lifestyle. They have built a successful wholesale business in the US and Europe, but their long-term strategy is to build an online presence that drives consumer direct purchases worldwide.

Venroy started selling through major retailers like Nordstrom’s and high-end hotel boutiques. The company quickly lost control of their brand and customer experience as they tried to fit into an existing supply chain model. Their initial website was built on older technology and highlighted their partner boutiques to generate the wholesale business. Based on the confines of the wholesale business model, Venroy made a strategic shift to focus solely on a consumer direct model. Core to this strategy are their new online and physical stores.

Their existing site was difficult to manage and maintain and couldn’t scale to support their online growth.  The team couldn’t create the kind of brand experience they wanted given the lack of flexibility of their existing platform including limited ability to customize features. They knew they needed a new site before the busy summer season. And they needed it fast.

The new site, built on Magneto 2.0, is consumer focused with the goal of getting website visitors to buy direct online or through their new physical store. Magento 2.0 gave them complete control over the shopping experience and lets them tell their story and communicate directly with customers. Critical to the project was a time-to-market requirement to have the site live to launch Venroy’s summer collection.

“Magento 2 has played an important role in helping us reclaim our brand and reconnect with our customers. With a production schedule of only 8 weeks, we were able to use much of Magento’s capabilities ‘out of the box’ to deliver a unique, mobile optimized brand experience. Magento has transformed our business and delivered exceptional results from the get go,“ said Sean Venturi, co-founder of Venroy.

Venroy selected Magento based on a strategic recommendation from Magento Gold Solution Partner, Netstarter. Venroy needed a scalable solution that could drive business growth and support their transition to a B2C model. The Netstarter team recommended Magento 2.0 because it supported all of the key project requirements ‘out of the box’, and the solution could be delivered with minimal customization to the core code.

It was important that the new platform allowed Venroy to implement a completely customized design interface that captured their brand identity and gave them the flexibility to easily and cost-effectively make updates for seasonal collections. They were able create this mobile-friendly, custom look fast by leveraging Magento 2.0’s responsive design reference theme and flexible frontend framework.

Magento 2.0 was easy for Venroy to customize in other ways. The modular codebase supported efficient implementation of custom modules for Venroy’s loyalty and referral programs. Strategic integrations with key services such as Braintree (payment processing), and Dotmailer (marketing automation) were also easily implemented and configured.

They also used the optimized checkout process included in Magento 2.0 to eliminate unnecessary steps and streamline the user journey. In fact, the new checkout has driven higher conversion rates and the post purchase account creation feature has helped increase the number of registered customers.

Magento 2.0’s mature cache implementation with Varnish delivered fantastic performance with minimal configuration. The touch-friendly Admin interface was a welcomed addition as the team frequently accesses the backend via a mobile device to process orders and perform urgent content management.  

Since launching the new site in November 2015, Venroy has experienced some encouraging results:

• 38% increase in the site wide conversion rate

• 60% increase in the mobile conversion rate

• 40% decrease in the average page load times

• Over 50% increase in the Google PageSpeed Insights score

The ability for Venroy to leverage so many built-in features enabled them to create a powerful and compelling online experience in about 2 months – in plenty of time for the summer sales.