Cloudinary > Case Studies > Reformation Designs Engaging Shopping Experiences with Cloudinary

Reformation Designs Engaging Shopping Experiences with Cloudinary

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Cloudinary

Tech Stack

Workarea
Ruby on Rails
Amazon server

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Brand Awareness

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

Applicable Industries

Apparel
Retail

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Supply Chain Visibility
Retail Store Automation

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Reformation is a Los Angeles-based fashion brand that “makes killer clothes that don’t kill the environment.” The process for its sustainable women’s clothing and accessories starts with designers thinking about what its customers really want to wear right now. While most fashion is designed 12 to 18 months before it’s released, at Reformation a sketch can become a dress in about a month. The company sources the most beautiful and sustainable fabrics possible to bring those designs to life quickly. Reformation has brick-and-mortar stores in California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Washington, D.C., with plans to open between five to eight new locations annually. These storefronts are designed to showcase the company’s products, but to date the majority of its business is conducted online.

The Challenge

Reformation, a Los Angeles-based fashion brand, primarily focuses on eCommerce, with more than half of their customers visiting its website using mobile devices. The company was using an out-of-the-box, built-in functionality included with Workarea, its eCommerce platform. It leveraged Dragonfly, a customizable RubyGem, to generate thumbnails in Ruby on Rails. However, this solution was causing issues as it required every website visitor to download the same image at the same resolution. This either caused issues with the quality of brand and product images on high-resolution screens or required unnecessary bandwidth use by the customer, depending on the platform or device they were using to access the site. Additionally, the company was experimenting with video on the site, integrating clips via Vimeo. However, the performance was choppy and not the quality experience it hoped to deliver to visitors.

The Solution

Reformation integrated Cloudinary into its workflow in October 2018 to support its fast turnaround from photoshoot to product launch. The creative team uploads final images to an FTP site, identifying products based on style, color, and other features. The development team has a cron job set up to check for those images on a regular basis, which then creates the necessary database connection and uploads to Reformation’s Amazon server. Cloudinary is used in the background to upload high-resolution originals and deliver an optimized, responsive version to each visitor, regardless of whether they access the site via the web or on their mobile device. Rather than manually specifying breakpoints for each image across the homepage, product listing page, and product details page, Reformation uses Cloudinary to automatically adjust the resolution and pixel density of every image based on the device pixel ratio (DPR) and viewport of the viewing device. In addition to these product images, which are featured on product listing and product detail pages, Reformation also leveraged Cloudinary to optimize its content images. The content images are marketing images, often with text overlays, that are handled through Reformation’s content management system. After seeing how Cloudinary had been instrumental in optimizing images, Reformation adopted it for videos as well. This process, too, is automated. The eCommerce merchandising team simply uploads each video into Workarea, then Cloudinary ensures delivery of videos with smooth streaming and no buffering interruptions, regardless of the device or bandwidth available to the customer.

Operational Impact

Cloudinary achieved significant improvements in online store performance, particularly across mobile browsers.
Cloudinary helped reduce the size of Reformation’s website, decreasing the total size of all images by 60%.
Images on the category page shrunk by 48% after Cloudinary was implemented.
Cloudinary helped with image optimization, Reformation explored how it could help in other parts of the business.
Reformation saw the benefit of using one platform for all of its image and video needs — simplifying its martech stack — with the same workflow.

Quantitative Benefit