Deliver a full buyer, seller and staff experience

A slow fashion company looking to be sustainable, Reluxe Fashion approached Atomic Innovation to help design the digital and operational sides of their business. To deliver a full buyer, seller and staff experience, we set up a two-sided marketplace across a variety of platforms, enabling them to achieve a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) within three months and a full marketing launch within five months.

Mindful about the environment, and the fact that the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry on our planet, they are passionate about reducing carbon emissions and have set sustainability as one of their core missions.

We partnered with Reluxe on their go-to-market digital strategy along with building out the website, eCommerce store, and operational and customer support processes required to launch and learn from the new venture.

Offering the best service to customers, buyers and sellers alike

Reluxe approached Atomic asking for help to build a two-sided marketplace (where buyers could be sellers and vice versa), a product inventory system (providing end-to-end item visibility) and have an MVP ready within three months. As they are a small team and have minimal operational staff, this was the original challenge.

Once this foundation was established, unlike other competitors who simply list products similar to eBay, their tools needed to be more sophisticated to support the business process of the ‘white-glove’ collection, authentication, pricing, studio photography and ultimately the listing on the website. This needed to be supported by a strong communications strategy.

Within a matter of days, we integrated them with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package and configured a lightweight inventory tracking system including unique barcodes for each item. The benefit of this allowed their concierge services to gather stock, and learn, grow and personalise the seller-side experience while in parallel with the buyer-side experience.

An online shop was established and BigCommerce Enterprise was chosen as the eCommerce suite - primarily for its ability to extend beyond basic commerce with direct access to APIs for uploading stock and integrating with third parties. Along with the customization of the front end, we were responsible for integrating key partners, such as Stripe.

Recognising this included building reports and dashboards to be used by the operational team on payouts for sellers, and integrations to allow the concierge team and the fashion interns to give the best experiences to their customers, buyers and sellers alike.

Business processes would require a certain amount of complexity and we needed to understand whether it was operationally viable. Atomic would have to hypothesise and validate their hypotheses as time went on.

This is a world of high fashion and as such a high level of design is required. Editorial pieces are the key to gaining interest in the fashion industry, so there really needs to be a lot of focus on creating visually astounding content.

Finally, they would need help with securing investment support and reviewing funding options. Atomic were there to put together the right messaging, decks and documentation to find the best option for them.

Building seller-side and buyer-side experiences

First things first, Atomic had to research the two-sided marketplace and understand what solutions they could utilise to support both the seller-side and buyer-side experiences. By comparing a Content Management System (CMS), a CRM tool and different eCommerce platforms, we were able to pinpoint the best solution for Reluxe.

The next step was to run competitor analysis to fully understand what their competition was doing. By mapping what features other eCommerce stores provided, we were able to plan what was needed in order to build something similar.

We ran end-to-end service blueprinting, ensuring they were able to support each individual process, and put together a tool assessment including the integrations needed to fulfil those customer journeys.

The following tools were used in order to achieve an MVP within three months:

• Hubspot (CRM) for seller-side management
• BigCommerce Enterprise (CMS) for editorial content and website design
• Mailchimp for marketing emails
• Google Apps Script for seller communication
• Slack for chat-ops
• Google Analytics for marketing
• Stripe for payments
• Xero for accounting
• Ship Theory for shipping

We put in place technical infrastructure and processes such as finance, communication, sales and marketing. Throughout we were teaching and delivering using a lean product development process.

Front-end customisation of available templates were required as they had such a bespoke offering with additional custom development needed to integrate with different systems.

As a data-centric solution is the key to proven success, we provided metrics in real-time to inform on the business model and help with investment decks, and mentoring, onboarding and tutorial sessions were given to new operational staff upon joining Reluxe.

A scalable digital platform

By providing a launchable MVP within three months, Reluxe were able to have a press launch within five months, and at the same time as officially launching both the digital and operational sides of their business.

For the rich editorial content, a high level of design experience was needed. With an end-to-end integrated solution across numerous platforms a functional seller process was achieved in one month. Additionally, we built the solution with multiple payment options, a variety of tech platforms and web apps, and it was viable to run for people with little tech experience.

The next phase for Reluxe is to continue to operate making use of the current systems in place in their day-to-day operations. The ultimate goal is to build a following, increase conversion, review metrics and plan on how to best utilise the platform.

It was a great experience working with Clare, Dan and the rest of the team at Reluxe, we achieved a lot together in a short period of time. We have a lot of faith in their business model and we are eager to watch them grow.