Rue Des Mille

Rue Des Mille is an Italian brand of prêt-à-porter jewelry with a strong presence both online and in the area, thanks to over 600 brick and mortar stores where you can buy their products. In the last year the company has registered a turnover of over 5 million euros and has become part of the international network of Elite, the program of the London Stock Exchange Group, born in Borsa Italiana in 2012 with the collaboration of Confindustria.

The challenge

For a company, e-commerce represents much more than a simple platform where products are sold. It is the first business card, a showcase where you can display your brand in the world. The experience that an e-commerce is able to provide is inextricably linked to the quality of a brand.\ We dealt with the renewal of the Rue Des Mille e-commerce with the aim of creating a platform whose image fully reflects the philosophy of Rue Des Mille.\ The project was developed from the ground up so as to be able to choose all the technologies necessary to build the bases of a flexible and future-oriented platform, with a user experience above the standard.

The main challenges we faced in the realization of the project were:

• Create a fluid and responsive user experience, optimized for smartphone browsing without giving up on offering adequate support for desktop features.
• Improve performance over the existing e-commerce by ensuring the scalability needed to support traffic peaks during promotions and events.
• Give administrators the ability to independently manage products.
• Create special collections and limited editions.
• Allow administrators to modify each page as desired.
• Internationalize content.
• Integrate physical retailers in the web platform.
• Migrate all data on the new platform without any interruption of services.

Mobile first and user experience

About 80% of Rue Des Mille users use smartphone e-commerce. From this data it follows that our approach was to take care in every detail of the mobile browsing experience, designing every detail of the site from a mobile-first perspective, but without obviously neglecting the correct use of the contents even from the desktop.\ We started the project working on both mobile and desktop prototypes, thinking about how to make every user action as intuitive as possible.

Performance and scalability

The faster your website the happier your users will be.

We have tried to take this concept to the extreme, using the latest technologies available, together with a manic work of optimization, to minimize any aspect that could make navigation less fluid and thus worsen the user experience. This work was fundamental especially for mobile users, where the speed of the connection is often not as efficient as that offered by a desktop workstation.

The result is an extremely fluid and responsive experience, without compromising on any functionality, regardless of the quality of the connection. Even during peak traffic with thousands of people connected simultaneously, no degradation of platform performance was found.

Product management and customization

We used Shopify for product and order management, along with a Headless CMS for all other content. This approach has allowed us to combine the solidity of Shopify with the flexibility of a CMS, creating a unique solution that allows the total customization of the site by the administrators, who are able to add, remove or modify the contents of the e-commerce in total autonomy.

An example of this flexibility is the "Carousel" collection, which allows the user to create his own personalized bracelet using letters and symbols, assisted by an interactive interface.

Limited edition - Valentina Ferragni collection

Rue des Mille has launched a limited edition signed by Valentina Ferragni.

The collection was launched in conjunction with the launch of the new e-commerce. So in fact the first live test took place under heavy traffic conditions. The platform has borne the load of the users perfectly, without experiencing any drop in performance with peaks of over 1000 users connected simultaneously.\ For the collection we also created a personalized landing page that was seamlessly integrated into e-commerce thanks to the flexibility of the CMS.

Content management

To manage the contents of the site we used a headless CMS, giving the possibility to the administrators of Rue Des Mille to modify every page at will and even create new pages completely independently.\ An example is the News page, where administrators can insert articles through a text editor and see them published within a few minutes.

Internationalization

One of the objectives of Rue Des Mille to consolidate brand awareness is to invest in foreign markets, with targets in particular on the United States and Spain. It was therefore essential to develop multilingual e-commerce. Internationalization has been managed through the use of the CMS, giving the possibility to independently modify the translations of all the contents.

Retailers

Rue Des Mille sells its products in over 600 physical stores in the area and it was necessary to insert in the e-commerce part where it was possible to search for shops. We decided to develop a customized section where all the retailers are displayed on an interactive map. This section allows both to search for a specific store and to view the stores closest to the user by geolocation. The insertion, modification and removal of resellers can be done independently by the management team.

Data migration

Transferring an entire e-commerce on a new platform was a delicate operation, especially having to guarantee that there was no interruption of the service. We worked closely with the Rue Des Mille team to ensure that the transfer of all products from the old to the new e-commerce was as smooth as possible, managing to guarantee the full continuity of the service.

The result

We are very satisfied with the result, because we have succeeded in satisfying the customer's requests and at the same time we have created an extremely innovative, flexible and performing platform. Thanks to the innovation introduced with the technologies used and to the optimization of performance, e-commerce offers a first-class user experience, decidedly superior to those that are the performance of a normal site.

Having said that, we recommend that you personally test what we have told you in this post by visiting Rue Des Mille