CHALLENGE

Wet Seal is a junior apparel brand for teenage girls who seek trend-focused and value competitive clothing with a target customer age of 13 to 19 years old. In early 2008, Fry redesigned and redeveloped Wet Seal’s e-commerce site to infuse it with energy, interactive features, and e-commerce best practices to drive revenue.

While the site’s overall look, merchandising, and features were a success, Wet Seal wanted to do something truly unique that would create buzz and drive revenue.

SOLUTION

Fry developed a drag-and-drop outfitting tool, “My Boutique,” that enables customers to pull together various pieces of clothing and then combine those items into a visual set of products called an “outfit.” The user can then share outfits with other users, add outfits to “The Runway,” rate outfits, and send an email to other outfit creators. Outfits can also be tagged for easy searching. Together these two areas represent a unique, easy-to-use web-based application for mixing and matching products within the Wet Seal store.  Customers can ultimately buy any outfit they build, their friends build, or any outfit published to the community from any number of users. 

RESULTS

The initial intent of the feature was to increase average order value and build loyalty. In addition to fulfilling these goals, the outfitter has become a phenomenally successful viral marketing tool. In just a few short months since its introduction, more than 100,000 outfits were created by a community of 25,000-plus registered fashionistas and more than 2 million detailed outfit page views were generated by this content. What’s more, visitors to the Wetseal.com fashion community purchase at twice the rate of shoppers who don’t visit the community.