AS Colour Gets Outfitted for International Growth on BigCommerce

SOLUTION

BigCommerce turned out to be a perfect fit.

After ultimately deciding on BigCommerce for their new ecommerce implementation, AS Colour enlisted the help of BigCommerce Agency Partner Moustache Republic to help develop the perfect ecommerce powerhouse to drive international direct-to-consumer (DTC) and B2B growth.

“At its core, AS Colour is a B2B business. But with their desire to grow into the DTC space, we knew BigCommerce would really check all the boxes,” said Tony Hou, CEO and Founder of Moustache Republic. “The website was going to require a balance between the two, DTC and B2B, and we knew that BigCommerce, the way it handles the checkout experience, plus the way it can handle products and SKUs, would be a perfect fit.”

DTC and B2B on one platform.

Selling both DTC and B2B has become an important aspect of AS Colour’s business, and they needed an ecommerce solution that could provide a customer-centric purchasing and browsing experience, while also providing specific functionality necessary for B2B sales.

But, as with most things in the fashion industry, the look, feel, and style of the site remained paramount.

“When you look at many apparel companies in the wholesale space, the websites are very much built for wholesale, and they look like it, too,” said Sharplin. “But because we have the DTC and B2B sides of the business, we really needed a website that had the look and feel of a retail site, while also providing that B2B functionality. BigCommerce is perfect in that aspect, because we can create a beautiful website, but also create customer groups, price tiers, and custom logins for business partners.”

AS Colour has used BigCommerce’s native B2B functionality to create two separate experiences on the same site. Locked behind a login portal, they have created groups and pricing tiers unique to individual customer groups. This makes it easier for them to manage individual customer relationships without the heavy lift of individual account management.

“We’ve kind of perfected our B2B experience in the U.S. and are looking to expand some of those optimisations into our other global markets,” he explained. “It’s a great example of how we can customise the different experiences based on locales, but still maintain the same overall narrative, look, and feel of the brand.”

One place AS Colour has perfected that B2B experience is in checkout. “We’ve made it where B2B customers get an almost completely different buying experience than DTC customers. Because, generally speaking, B2B customers buy more products than their DTC counterparts,” Hou explained. “The cart layout is different, the product presentation is different, and then of course, the checkout experience is tailored to their needs, too.”

BigCommerce makes global growth a breeze.

AS Colour, a multinational brand, uses BigCommerce to not only test and customise user interface and experience, but also to localise the website content and experience to the different regions in which they operate.

“While the overall look and feel of each site is the same, there are very specific back-end tweaks that we make to suit each region,” Sharplin said. “It’s really important to us that we can easily make changes to local pricing and currencies.”

“We also love the ability to move quickly between our four stores,” he continued. “Me, our ecommerce manager, and our development agency, Moustache Republic, are doing everything across our New Zealand, US, Australia, and UK sites. Whether we’re updating a product description or creating a whole new product page, the ability to switch between the four sites is really seamless. We love it.”

Growing with an extensive network of technology and agency partners.

While AS Colour uses a number of native features available on BigCommerce in their site implementation, they also take advantage of tools built by BigCommerce technology partners. “Shogun allows us to create beautiful content pages, which publish through to the website seamlessly. It’s really reliable,” he said. “And Shipper HQ allows us to manage shipping and logistical operations around the world.”

For more custom features and improvements, AS Colour has turned to Moustache Republic to help with programming. “Our checkout is fully customised and built out and we’re also working to customise our category page,” explained Sharplin. “We’re integrating Searchspring to help enhance the search UX, so those will both launch at the same time.”

“The category implementation is really amazing,” Hou said. “We had to think about how we can best show their customers 50, 60 different colours that were available for one product. Through the GraphQL API, we were able to create a flow for customers to hover over individual colours and up would pop an image with the new design. It takes not even .5 seconds to change between images. It’s something we’re really proud of.”

But a key piece of custom functionality was built in-house by AS Colour’s IT manager. “Something that’s really been integral for us is the customisation with Shipper HQ, to get that to work with our two US warehouses,” he said. “Our IT manager was able to build it into our back-end to allow products to get split between those two warehouse locations. Something behind the scenes, but it’s really integral to our operations there.”