About Press Hall

Press Hall is a new blank apparel brand for US small businesses and makers. It sells blank apparel and offers extensive knowledge to help consumers create masterpieces with blank apparel. Press Hall eCommerce store is a destination for makers and an inspiring community of like-minded people striving to share their creativity with the world. 

The Challenge

Composable architecture for a flexible experience

Press Hall embarked on its journey with a clear understanding of the importance of tech innovations and trends for its continued growth. Fierce competition prompted business leaders to seek efficient solutions that could enhance customer engagement and speed up Time-to-Market for their web store. The brand aimed to minimize its tech ownership while simultaneously achieving a highly scalable and flexible experience. Composable commerce appeared to be the ideal solution, as it would enable Press Hall to seamlessly combine the best-of-breed technologies in a robust eCommerce stack, streamlining integration and saving valuable time while reducing manual effort.

Faster Time-to-Market was crucial

Avoiding the need to start frontend development for composable commerce from scratch stood as the primary objective for Press Hall's business leaders, given that this process is both time-consuming and costly. Concurrently, prioritizing a faster Time-to-Market remained a core focus for the brand.

Press Hall sought to:

1. Leverage technologies with an extensive developer community.
2. Implement out-of-the-box integrations with market-proven CMSes and search tools.
3. Take advantage of managed hosting options.

These strategies were key to Press Hall's vision for achieving success in the ever-evolving landscape of eCommerce.

Why Alokai?

The Press Hall team evaluated best-of-breed frontend solutions , considering options such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, and Alokai Frontend as a Service (FEaaS). 

As a result, the decision swung in favor of Alokai, primarily due to its foundation in Vue.js and its seamless compatibility with the company's eCommerce stack components, including:

• The commercetools eCommerce platform

• Contentstack CMS

• Algolia and Checkout.com payment methods

Another compelling factor that influenced Press Hall's choice of Alokai was the availability of API Docker hosting, ensuring data security and facilitating smooth maintenance.

Solution

For Press Hall, Alokai became the starting point for delivering a rich headless experience with enterprise-level services. Its robust, pre-built architecture, out-of-the-box integrations with best-of-breed eCommerce solutions, and a fully customizable framework contributed to a 50% acceleration of the development process.

"Alokai got us to market in 6 months instead of 14-16."

Stephen Jacobson

VP of Engineering, Press Hall

This excellent result proves that Frontend as a Service is the right choice for businesses striving to build frontend at a fraction of the cost and time. 

Alokai support is a significant value: IMPACT Services

The overall support and attention from the Alokai team were genuinely surprising for Press Hall. Alokai members resolved various technical issues side by side with the client, beginning with handling breaking changes in versions and concluding with improving limited documentation. Press Hall receives comprehensive tech support through a Slack channel whenever needed, making their cooperation efficient and transparent. 

Results

Even though Press Hall is only at the beginning of its business journey, the decision to adopt Alokai in a composable approach has already had a significant impact on their results. This digital transformation has enabled the company to enhance web performance, engage audiences, improve customer experience, and boost mobile revenue, which exceeded $130,000 in January-February 2023.

Press Hall's composable commerce journey with Alokai has already enabled the brand to: 

• speed up time-to-market by 50%

• achieved 4.22M page views in the first year

• grow to 3K new users a month from organic search 

• reach a conversion rate of 4.39%

• complete 22K+ transitions with an average time on site of 1m 35s