For over twenty years, Vera Bradley has attracted a loyal following of customers who not only look forward to the lovely new fabrics and styles that are introduced each season, but who also appreciate the function and quality that is synonymous with the Vera Bradley name.
Vera Bradley came to Fry with a growing customer base and a site that couldn’t handle the volume of traffic. Nor was the site flexible enough to offer the type of promotions Vera Bradley wanted to present to its valued customers. The goals for the replatformed, redesigned site also included an improved shopping experience, a richer feature set, with the design and beauty of the products at the forefront.
Fry’s creative team led collaborative sessions with Vera Bradley’s creative team—focusing on lifestyle positioning of the products—which led to the exciting new look of the site. The user experience team identified users’ key navigational behaviors (category, color and collections) and designed the new interface accordingly. The technical solution included MICROS-Retail's Open Commerce Platform™ (OCP), a good fit for need to scale for volume and create unique, targeted promotions for customers. OCP's multi-site capability was exploited with the launch of Vera Bradley Japan in early 2011. Running on the same instance of the core software, the Japanese site retains the same design, with localized, translated content presented on the front end.
Using the features of the new OCP site, Vera Bradley’s marketers and merchandisers can now make extensive use of OCP’s Experience Manager to create personalized experiences to drive revenue.
As a result of the improved user experience, the site experienced a significant decrease in cart abandonment and dramatic increase in overall site conversion. Launched in October 2009, the new site exceeded holiday forecasts by 30%.