Taking a cue from its customers, Bluefly Inc.’s Bluefly.com, a discount retailer of designer apparel and home furnishings, has improved site search and navigation as part of a site redesign launched today. The redesign also strives for elegance by displaying apparel on models against a white background. At a time when large retail sites like eBay.com and Amazon.com are also selling some designer-label fashions, Bluefly wanted to further stand out as specialist in its field, says CEO Ken Seiff. “Our goal is to be the best in the world at selling just designer fashions, so we built our site accordingly,” he says.
Bluefly has also added about $3 million in newly available merchandise to coincide with the redesign, increasing by 25% its number of product presentations, to more than 12,000, Seiff says.
Bluefly used an in-house team to redesign its site. The changes to the site’s appearance–-trading product shots and background colors for models and white space–-came from its own staff’s ideas, but the changes to search and navigation came largely from ideas generated by customers, Seiff says. “We spend an enormous amount of time listening to what our customers want,” he says. “We get input from customer surveys, customer service communications, even from overhearing what people say in restaurants about online shopping.”
The search and navigation changes let shoppers search by size or product keywords, and to shop by new product arrivals, by product category or by designer.
Seiff says he expects the redesign to help increase Bluefly’s growth as it heads into the fall holiday shopping season, even surpassing its recent growth rate. “We were up 26% in net sales for August, but now we’re expecting an even bigger and better holiday season,” he says. Bluefly’s August sales rose to $3 million from $2.4 million.
Bluefly, which sells fashion apparel and home furnishings it acquires through closeouts, deals with about 500 designer brands. On average, it displays products from about 350 of them at any one time, Seiff says.
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