FELISSIMO Corp. is one of the largest mail-order catalogue companies in Japan offering a wide range of products, from apparel to household goods to cosmetics, publishing more than ten core catalogs a year, in addition to its various ancillary editions. FELISSIMO was an early ecommerce entrant, launching its commerce site in 1995; at the end of 2010, online orders were more than 50% of company sales.

FELISSIMO takes a unique approach towards customer co-design in sharing its design concepts and collection ideas with its customers. Shoppers first select a theme they like from a series of items, such as shirts or pants, then their size, and trust FELISSIMO to decide on the colors and designs. The result has been a stream of merchandise collections season after season that have resulted in a loyal customer base. FELISSIMO credits its success to the deep customer involvement and a shared understanding with customers of its planning concepts.

Challenges:

• Deliver an online catalog that replicates the user experience of flipping through FELISSIMO's print catalog pages, capturing the delight of seeing unexpected merchandising and innovative product concepts at the turn of each page;
• Mitigate online catalog production hurdles, including long turnaround times and outsourced production costs;
• Preserve loyal base of repeat customers by anticipating changing shopper behavior as the mail-order business is expected to change when tablet device adoption accelerates; 
• Improve the site user experience by integrating merchandise imagery that accentuates the attention to detail underlying FELISSIMO products.

Best Practices:

• Easily convert FELISSIMO's popular print catalogs to online editions, giving greater reach to its catalogs;
• Launch iPad and iPhone apps to enable catalog browsing, delivering a portable experience for highly mobile Japanese consumers;
• Deliver an enjoyable catalog experience through new channels at a low-cost;
• Create a great online shopping experience that lets customers magnify product details and examine them from a single image.

Adobe Scene7 enabled FELISSIMO to quickly create electronic catalogs and product pages complete with high-resolution product photographs. The eCatalogs solution entails a simple process, with no special expertise required to create one. The user simply selects a catalog template, which can be customized, and uploads the PDF. Consequently, FELISSIMO shaved its online catalog production time from two weeks to three days, while eliminating the need to outsource the catalog production. This accelerated workflow also meant that FELISSIMO was able to expand and more easily synchronize its catalog promotions with marketing in other channels.

"We chose the Adobe Scene7 eCatalog solution because we could use it immediately, and with a high production output," said Shigehito Shima, Manager of eBusiness, FELISSIMO. "Adobe Scene7 is also scalable, which offers a huge advantage when our operations expand."

FELISSIMO quickly creates electronic catalogs for the iPhone, iPad

With the online catalogs in place, it was simply another step to deliver them to new media, e.g., smart phones and tablets.  In response to the popularity of the Apple iPhone and iPad, FELISSIMO introduced apps for browsing its online catalogs, developing the catalog application in-house using the eCatalog data hosted and served by Scene7.

With lots of interactive tools, users can zoom in on the merchandise for a closer look at the product details, and a light tap on the image flips the screen to the shopping basket. Users can also select multiple products from multiple FELISSIMO catalogs and pay for them all at once in a single transaction.

Bringing its catalogs to iPhone and iPad users means that mobile shoppers now have access to FELISSIMO catalogs while on the go. "Up until now, our customers would never have carried our catalogs to work in their bags," said Shima."There were also limits to how much time our customers could spend looking through catalogs. But now, with the arrival of these new devices, customers can look through our catalogs even during their commutes. What’s more, FELISSIMO gains much from its newfound ability to appear quickly in new media at a low cost. It all became possible with eCatalogs."

In addition, the transition from paper to digital catalogs will surely delight those ecologically-minded FELISSIMO customers. 

Scene7 enriches FELISSIMO's website

In addition to creating eCatalogs, FELISSIMO has also taken steps to enrich its commerce site with lush images and visuals that drive shopper engagement—and ultimately, conversion. Thanks to the Scene7 Dynamic Imaging solution, online shoppers no longer have to switch between pages to get a detailed view of a product; instead, they simply zoom in on any detail on the product image. The zoom view on a simple blouse, for example, enables the customer to see the sheen of the fabric. Zooming in on a rug, the customer can imagine its soft texture. The zoom views allow FELISSIMO to translate the attention-to-detail that its designers have invested into each product, making them accessible in ways that are impossible to represent in printed catalogs.

"Collection designer and planners want to provide customers with more than 10 times the information they can squeeze into the catalogs," Shima said. "Enrichment, to us, is communicating to customers the care and thinking that goes into these products. Words may sometimes be the best way. At other times, visual expression and community sites are better."

Results

• Shortened production time for electronic catalogs from two weeks to three days
• Developed an electronic catalog application for iPad/iPhone at a low cost
• Improved user experience with high image resolutions that allowed users to see details and close-ups to help facilitate their purchase decisions
• Recognized 50% in cost savings by producing catalogs in-house instead of outsourcing

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