Astound Commerce's approach to design goes beyond just functionality; it is about creating an experience that engages and delights the customer. It uses brand-driven creative inspiration, conceptual vision, and research insights coupled with strategy and ideation, prototyping, and testing, ensuring that every design decision is based on an understanding of customer behavior and business objectives to deliver comprehensive visual solutions that incorporate UX imperatives. The visually stunning, seamless experiences that Astound designs not only evoke brand identity but also engage customers and drive sales. By creating cohesion across the customer journey and every digital channel, Astound ensures a seamless path to purchase on any device, at any time. For these reasons, ELIE SAAB and AllSaints, two iconic fashion brands, have turned to Astound to reimagine their online presence and enhance the customer experience.
ELIE SAAB, known for its glamorous evening wear, collaborated with Astound to create an immersive, multi-award-winning direct-to-consumer (D2C) site that reflects the brand's core values. Astound provided strategic design services, aligning new vision, business structures, technologies, and processes to define the overarching ambition for web content. With Shopify Plus expertise, Astound optimized the platform's functionality and built a seamless UX that replicates the personal aspects of a high-end in-store shopping experience. Elie Saab Jr, CEO of ELIE SAAB, commended Astound's strategic vision and technical expertise in translating the brand values online, delivering a strong content strategy and tone of voice.
AllSaints, a contemporary fashion brand, partnered with Astound to execute a complete future-proof re-platform to Salesforce Commerce Cloud to accelerate the brand's global growth. Astound optimized Commerce Cloud functionality with key third-party integrations and implemented Salesforce Page Designer to enable easy, user-friendly content management. Astound worked with AllSaints' internal teams to ensure a modern aesthetic that captures the essence of the brand. With an optimized site architecture, Astound cut an onerous seven-page-plus checkout process down to just one page, resulting in a seamless user experience. The collaboration resulted in the launch of three best-in-class storefronts in a single month targeting the UK, the US, and the rest of the world.
The transformation of ELIE SAAB and AllSaints’ online shopping presences and the creation of seamless, personalized experiences for their customers speaks to Astound's ability to deeply understand the desires and challenges of a target audience. Astound conducts primary research involving interviews or surveys and establishes key industry trends through the lens of its clients’ business needs and their customers’ behaviors. Astound's team then synthesizes business, brand, and customer analysis, combined with research and data insights, to envision transformative experiences that exceed customer expectations.
Commerce is at the heart of why brands and consumers connect—and perhaps no one demonstrates a better understanding of this than Astound. The company recognizes that meeting shopper demand in the moment is critical, and it requires deep commerce expertise to acquire, expand, and retain customer value and drive business success. As a result, the company has a proven track record of turning one-time customers into lifelong advocates through creative and innovative strategies that align with a brand's objectives and business goals.
Astound's solutions are designed to captivate consumers, drive sales, and grow revenue. By leveraging behavior-based predictive strategies, Astound creates cross-channel customer journeys that align inbound and outbound engagement, affiliate partnerships, and story-driven content optimization to expand conversion and deliver superior lifelong customer value. By using compelling brand storytelling, highly curated segmentation strategies, and predictive intelligence, Astound turns casual purchasers into brand champions for its clients.
Astound's ability to create memorable experiences makes it an excellent partner for brands seeking a global omnichannel commerce partner, empowering them to transcend expectations and thrive in the digital realm.
One such client is Skechers, a global footwear brand that partnered with Astound to repeat the success of its US site on a global scale. Astound used the Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA RefApp) approach to expand the functionality of Skechers’ existing US site built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud to international markets, building individual ecommerce websites in multiple countries throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. With its new digital ecosystem powered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SFRA, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Skechers can manage its multichannel business in a single platform, scale its ecommerce operations without limitation, and accelerate market activation, resulting in record-breaking revenue growth across markets and channels.
Astound's long partnership with L’Oréal has helped the global beauty giant accelerate its growth and direct-to-consumer goals. Astound proposed, conceived, and built L’Oréal's original RefApp in 2013, setting the stage for evolving a next-generation version based on growing needs and a changing ecommerce landscape. It also offered ongoing support for scores of brands under the L’Oréal umbrella. Leveraging the RefApp, Astound successfully re-platformed four existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites onto a single, unified platform. Astound then went on to support more than 140 sites around the world by 2018 and contributed to the conceptualization, innovation, and build-out of a next-generation mobile-first platform in 2018. Astound has enabled improvements and new features, including virtual consultations, product comparisons, and elevated mobile journeys for more than 40 brand sites for L’Oréal Americas since 2020.
“Platform evolution is ongoing, and global adoption has been moving at an accelerated pace. Over the course of our long collaboration, Astound has worked on multiple brand launches on the platform, multiple ecommerce features, and dozens of third-party integrations,” comments MK, adding, “By understanding your business challenges and objectives, we are able to craft solutions to lay the foundation for success for our clients. Astound Commerce understands that growth is at the heart of commerce.”
Helping clients identify opportunities to grow existing channels, unlock new revenue streams, and increase relevance for their customers is no easy task. All of Astound's engagements are prefaced with data-informed insights on consumer behaviors, emerging trends, and industry benchmarks. It's this deep, holistic understanding of consumer preferences and the ecommerce landscape that makes Astound stand out as the go-to company for creating strategic, modern commerce experiences.