The Brief
Au Départ was founded way back in 1834. The brand reached great success in the 1920s, when it was considered as one of the four greatest French trunk-makers alongside Louis Vuitton, Goyard and Moynat. Some decades later, Au Départ, already merged with competitor Moynat, entered a ‘sleeping mode‘ in 1976. Now the brand is back again with a really fresh take on bespoke trunks, bags, accessories and high-tech for cosmopolitan nomads. To bring this fresh vision to life, Au Départ chose Charle to design and develop a bespoke Shopify build, whilst migrating from Commercelayer and WordPress.
Industry
Fashion
Project
Shopify Design & Development
Technology
Website
Creative Direction
The design is what truly makes this project special. It was vital that I captured a creative design style that was brand consistent and delivered a luxury on-site experience . We conducted full brand and e-commerce discovery examining key brand guide considerations, competitors, and the current online presence of the brand. This enabled our creative team to ensure that the design phase matched Au Départ’s image, goals, and mission for this exciting project. The store is minimalist, sleek and product-centric whilst offering an entirely branded experience.
Technical Delivery
Our dedicated Shopify development team built an entierely custom Shopify theme that leverages the very best frameworks and speed optimisation. The store features custom built filtering, advanced search integration powered by Algolia and a UX that allows products to be discovered with ease. The store leverages Shopify Online Store 2.0 leaving Au Départ's marketing in control.
Global Migration To Shopify
Au Départ, historically, leveraged a headless approach for their store which became hard to manage and costly to update. The project involved migrating the brand from CommerceLayer to Shopify Plus. This included customer data management and SEO redirect set up. The migration effected all global operations and the brand is expanding to international markets powered by Shopify Markets and Shopify Plus multi-store.
