The second we plugged Searchspring in, everything just got so much easier. We’re constantly getting feedback that our site is now easier to manage, easier to navigate, and people are finding their products faster.”
Katie Ouaknine
Owner, Badgley Mischka Web
The Brand
Badgley Mischka is an affordable luxury apparel brand with a focus on timeless elegance.
Founded by couture designers, Mark Badgley and James Mischka, the online store brings the duo’s high-end styles and red carpet glamor to a wider customer base. Fashion and art go hand in hand for Mark and James, and their sketches and personality permeate the site.
“When people think of special occasions, they think of Badgley Mischka,” says Katie Ouaknine, Owner at Badgley Mischka Web. Beyond gowns and cocktail dresses, the brand also specializes in footwear and bridal lines, and has become a go-to name in both categories.
Despite the cancellation of so many 2020 events that would typically call for occasion wear, the brand has remained relevant, and has observed new trends in customer buying patterns. “We’ve noticed that more women are coming to our site for understated white dresses, which we think they are buying as gowns for more intimate garden weddings,” says Katie. “It’s really nice to see that we can still be of value to our customers as they dress up for smaller events. Some of the higher-end designer brands are a little out of touch for people right now.”
The Challenges
Badgley Mischka’s ecommerce store was originally run on a small-scale platform with a lot of built-in functionality, but little potential for growth. A migration to BigCommerce promised opportunity for customization, but they quickly ran into challenges with native search.
“We learned that the filters and the information that BigCommerce pulls was really hard to manage. We also had some data problems when we migrated that were skewing search results,” says Katie.
They initially trialled plugin solutions to overcome these issues, but found the functionality to be lacking. The team also identified a need for enhanced merchandising capabilities. “Sorting products natively in BigCommerce is really difficult, they have global sort options but they don’t have category sorting so merchandising was a huge selling point for us with Searchspring.”
The Solutions
Badgley Mischka integrated Searchspring on their search and category pages. “Going through the onboarding process, Searchspring solved problems for us that I didn’t even expect,” says Katie.
“We had an issue where customers couldn’t tell when we had items in more than one color and the team took care of it. We found solutions that we didn’t even know were possible.”
When it comes to merchandising, Katie makes particular use of boost rules, promotional badges to highlight new arrivals, and the platform’s drag and drop functionality.
“We can now tailor our category landing pages and have them line up with our email campaigns. Our marketing director loves to feature an item in an email and then have that item be the first one you find when you visit the linked category. That was really complicated before so we use that feature a lot.”
Searchspring’s reporting has also enabled the Badgley Mischka team to build tailored landing pages based on common search terms, and redirect shoppers who had previously encountered “no results found”. With a significant international customer base, synonyms have also proved useful to account for variations in spelling and product naming conventions. “We might call a product one thing, when some customers know it as something else, so fine-tuning all of those elements of search has been really beneficial to us.”
The Results
“The second we plugged Searchspring in, everything just got so much easier. We’re constantly getting feedback that our site is now easier to manage, easier to navigate, and people are finding their products faster,” Katie says.
