TALLY WEiJL

About TALLY WEiJL

TALLY WEiJL, founded in 1984 in a small garage in Switzerland, distinguished itself in the competitive fashion industry by consistently exceeding customers' expectations.

Co-founders Tally Elfassi-Weijl and Beat Grüring embarked on a mission to make the latest fashion trends accessible. They supplied clothing to Swiss fashion houses and boutiques, often operating out of the back of their small Fiat. Despite the logistical challenges, they always managed to deliver 'just in time,' a trademark that would come to define the company.

A little over a decade after its inception, TALLY WEiJL embarked on a global expansion, boasting over 50 stores across Europe by the year 2000. In the subsequent years, TALLY WEiJL emerged as a prominent international player in the fashion retail industry.

TALLY WEiJL needed to find a solution that would bring together both Gen Z’s expectations regarding the look and feel of the online shopping experience and limit the time and resources needed for maintenance and future development of any additional CR boosters.

Matylda Kłoda

Senior Digital Manager, E-commerce, TALLY WEiJL

The Challenge

Today, the globally recognized brand has taken a significant step forward by investing in an omnichannel digital transformation. While TALLY WEiJL had previously acknowledged the importance of digital channels, operating 14 Magento-based webshops, the ever-evolving internet landscape necessitated further adaptations. Additionally, the brand faced the challenge of capturing the interest of Generation Z, a task easier said than done.

The desired solution needed to reconcile seemingly contradictory advantages: flexibility and ease of use. TALLY WEiJL had no intention of upending its entire system and rebuilding it from the ground up. Managing operations in 14 locations with different currencies, diverse product ranges, and a customized marketing and promotional calendar, all synchronized with SAP and PLM systems down to the finest details, posed a significant barrier to a comprehensive overhaul. The company aimed to work more intelligently and sought a solution that would allow for frequent, mobile-friendly updates on the user experience layer without resorting to deep and risky changes in the backend.

PWA represents a strategic innovation for TALLY WEiJL online growth.

Marco Preda

Chief Digital Officer, TALLY WEiJL

Solution

TALLY WEiJL’s desire to move away from “all-in-one”, monolithic platforms wasn't unusual as the entire eCommerce industry is slowly moving away from this model which has dominated the market over the past decade. Why? Monolithic platforms deliver great possibilities "out of the box," but they come with drawbacks in shaping the UX layer. Improving the customer journey requires "patching" the platform’s shortcomings with custom development for each and every improvement, which generates costs and takes time. That is a deal-breaker for most companies that target a young audience and strive to keep up with their changing tastes.

The agency chosen to get the job done, didn't have any second thoughts about the best way to achieve this goal. As a platform-agnostic framework delivering PWA features, Alokai turned out to be the best option for TALLY WEiJL for two main reasons: From the business point of view, it focuses on improving performance and delivering mobile-first features, and its API-first architecture satisfies system stability, allowing frequent and meaningful changes to the customer experience without patching the backend. 

Betting on PWA technology turned out to be a homerun. Although Progressive Web Apps are not new, they keep gaining popularity at native mobile applications' expense. Native apps require more development time to implement and maintain, which is expensive. Moreover, they are no longer the go-to experience for users, overwhelmed with hundreds of applications competing for their attention.

PWAs providing users with a native-like UX, but eliminating the walled gardens of app stores, are growing into the next Big Thing in the tech world, according to " eCommerce Trends Report 2021 ", and TALLY WEiJL decided to leverage them. 
What was it like working with Alokai?

At first, setting up the infrastructure itself was quite tricky. The entire system development was changed, but in the end, Alokai turned out to be very flexible, and it works well with Magento.

Szymon Kustra

E-Commerce Development Leader, TALLY WEiJL

Results

All that effort turned out to be more than worthwhile. Freeing itself from the limitations imposed by the coupled Magento architecture, TALLY WEiJL can count on delivering new features in time and more effectively answering both customer and business needs.

With Alokai, TALLY WEiJL has achieved:

• a 131% boost in mobile revenue;
• a 140% growth in conversion rate;
• a 45% increase in page views.