GANNI: Curated showrooms for every collection

Baggrund

Every season, Scandinavian street style brand GANNI opened the doors of its showroom to showcase its latest collection of unique, funky, and colourful clothes to B2B buyers. But when COVID-19 disrupted the world—and the fashion industry—the brand needed to re-imagine how it would present its pieces and stay connected with its buyers. So, GANNI turned to DEPT® to embark on a collaboration to design and build a digital-only lookbook and showroom that would impress and inspire wholesale buyers.

Although the aim was to present the brand’s newest collection to its B2B buyers, we wanted to take things a step further and create an immersive experience that incorporated elements reflecting GANNI’s brand personality.

In just six weeks, DEPT® successfully crafted a micro website with a playful retro aesthetic, captivating viewers’ attention. Its overwhelming positive reception surpassed all expectations, transforming what was initially intended as a one-time fix into an integral part of GANNI’s brand. Through our ongoing collaborative partnership, we’ve now created more than a dozen uniquely themed digital showrooms for new collections.

Løsning

Each time GANNI launches a new collection, which is four times a year, we change the experience layer of the showroom. Examples of previous themes in GANNI’s digital showrooms have been flowers, butterflies, and bicycles, where each experience is uniquely developed for that particular collection and theme. The core functionality is something we keep from release to release. However, it has evolved a lot over time and is much more tailored to buyers’ needs today.

To coincide with the first versions of the digital showroom, we made a look book. In the look book, you can see an overview of styles, images, videos, and links to the relevant items in the collection. Since the first version, we’ve added much more functionality to help buyers – e.g., search, product pages, view options, etc. The product list in the digital showroom can also be styled to match the campaign’s overall identity, and buyers can get an overview and zoom in on the fabrics and materials used.

Every digital showroom has its unique identity, and we dedicate significant effort to ensuring the identity is integrated throughout the experience. We consistently incorporate a playful approach into the individual digital showrooms, which is evident through various elements like gimmicks, games, imaginative transitions, and more. The primary focus is always on showcasing the new products and promoting the GANNI brand.

For the original GANNI showroom, we opted to use a customisable, blank slate Netlify CMS that enabled fast and flexible development via a friendly user interface. This allowed us to deploy it quickly and made it easy for the GANNI team to work with the site. Our lean setup allowed us to swiftly adapt the experience layer to perfectly align with the identity of new collections. We also used Contentful for media hosting purposes, enabling us to construct a small-scale, coherent, and self-contained application. This streamlined approach allows us to dynamically tailor brand experiences.

As we continue to adapt the digital showrooms for each new collection, we’re able to retain the core functionality of the original while evolving and upgrading the microsite experience.