Corra’s Custom Design for Eyefly Online
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Eyefly, an online retailer of affordably priced yet fashion forward eyewear, just launched its business by unveiling an online store that sets new standards for user experience.
Eyefly is a joint venture between Bluefly, a leading online retailer of designer fashion and accessories, and A + D Labs, a premier designer and manufacturer of fashion eyewear. “We are treating glasses as an accessory from a fashion perspective,” explains Melissa Payner,” Bluefly’s CEO. “Your face is the first thing someone sees. So why wouldn’t you have glasses to suit your look?” Eyefly is a unique concept in fashion eyewear offering consumers on-trend frames and prescription lenses for a fraction of the price of eyewear boutiques.
This new concept required a fresh approach to the all-important online storefront as well in order to provide an engaging and interactive online shopping experience. “We knew our website had to be special,” said Brad Matson, Bluefly CMO. “Every element of the user experience had to support the fashion forward brand of our business.”
After much research, Eyefly selected Magento, the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world, as the basis for its new site.Eyefly turned to multichannel commerce consulting and implementation firm Corra to realize its vision for the site. “I was already very committed to our site design,” Matson said. “I knew I needed a technology company, not just another interactive agency, to do the work.” Corra is a long time Gold Partner of Magento and the dominant provider of Magento-based ecommerce solutions on the east coast.
“We looked at Eyefly’s designs for its online store and immediately knew the site had to be special,” said Ron Bongo, Corra CEO. “We also knew that we’d be undertaking some major customizations to achieve their cutting edge vision.” With no approaches yet established by the Magento developer and partner community to deliver the desired functionality, Corra’s analysts and engineers waded into the project full bore to tackle then solve the technical challenges posed by the project.
In addition to standing up a high performance Magento site with a completely custom theme, Corra created a complex prescriptions module to allow customers to save a prescription during checkout. The Eyefly site’s Virtual Try On powered by Fitting Box allows customers to upload a photo of themselves and then see exactly what they will look like wearing various types of frames. Customers are encouraged to not only try a variety of frames, but to purchase them on the spot. Other notable capabilities developed exclusively for Eyefly include a highly customized checkout procedure that required major surgery to the Magento’s native capabilities, and the integration of over a dozen 3rd party extensions.
“There is no question that the Eyefly site takes the enterprise capabilities and flexibility of Magento to a new level” said Roy Rubin, Magento CEO. “That’s one reason having partners like Corra is so important to our success—they can make Magento do things nobody has tried before.”
Only four months after the initial meeting between Eyefly and Corra, Eyefly opened its virtual doors to much fanfare on June 2nd. The long hours worked and tight deadlines were worth it though. “The site looks great and works great,” Mr. Matson said. “Now we’re off to the races.”
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