CHALLENGE

The leading worldwide media company providing integrated marketing solutions for the fashion, life sciences and powersports industries wanted to provide merchants and buyers with an innovative digital platform to facilitate commerce, communication and community. The site would compliment Advanstar's biannual MAGIC Market Week, the world’s most comprehensive apparel, footwear and accessories trade event in North America.

SOLUTION

Guidance delivered a Magento Enterprise website that provides MAGIC exhibitors and attendees the tools required to share and explore product lines before, during and after the tradeshow events. The mobile sites were optimized for the iOS iPad platform.

The site is currently managed by more than 3,200 brand users, and will showcase more than 1,000,000 products to nearly 56,000 buyers.

The website includes showcase landing pages highlighting each brand’s new lines being exhibited.  From this page, buyers are able to sort by category and save individual pieces to their “Lookbook”, the fashion industry’s equivalent of assortment planning. Within the product detail page, buyers can select colors and sizes to save the item to their “Line Sheets” (purchase orders), save merchandise notes, examine each piece in detail with image zoom, and add the piece to their Lookbook as well.

With “My Dashboard”, buyers have the ability to view their order(s) by brand, download them into Excel or PDF formats, and email or print them.

Guidance integrated Magento with Omniture/SiteCatalyst (user tracking), Google Analytics, Experient (MAGIC registration platform), Sherpa Solutions (MAGIC map tool and show planner) and EdgeCast (CDN). 

INNOVATION

• By extensively customizing the Magento administration screens, non-technical users at brands such as Hugo Boss, TOMS and American Apparel have access to streamlined versions of the administration interface where they can easily create, edit and import product info to showcase their new lines every season.
• Products maintain their unique attributes across all brands while respecting brand-specific customization and values.
• Product database indices are updated incrementally to maintain site responsiveness regardless of the product catalog size.
• A customized user registration system allows all of Advanstar's 55,000 MAGIC attendees to access the site without the need to create accounts beforehand.
• Extensive customization of Magento’s “Wish List”, shopping cart and “Add to Cart” functionality was implemented to add many configurable products into “Lookbooks” and “Line Sheets”.