tjallamalla is a cloth retailer in Stockholm, Sweden. They work according to the same principles as an indie record label – when they find good up and coming cloth designers, they will pick him/her up and give them the opportunity to sell in their store. Tjallamalla has a strong brand and the people who work there are driven by a genuine love for art, fashion and clothes. This is a short summary of the schoolproject that grew into a paid freelance project spanning over a couple of months:
The Brief
tjallamalla needed a webshop that was easy to use, on a tight budget.
Our Solution
We chose to use Shopify as a CMS and modified the frontend extensively. The site was launched on the 2th December 2009.
Challenges
- Our greatest technical challenge was to get liquid to play along nicely and conform to our wishes. Liquid is like ruby on rails but without the freedom to modify to the extent of our needs. It does have some benefits though as it is a little safer to use in a webshop than ruby – I guess that is why it´s used by Shopify.
Setbacks
- That Shopify did NOT offer payment solutions that would better fit tjallamallas needs. From Shopifys website it´s easy to think that you´ld just ask for a payment solution and they would try add it for you. Shopify is still an American company with the majority of their income stemming from the US. As a small customer from Scandinavia you would be wrong to assume that your questions would be treated with any priority. This is our experience and unfortunately it cost us and our client a great deal of time and effort to reach profitability using the payment solution – a pretty heavy matter! We are still not satisfied with Shopifies payment solutions. But a good thing with Shopify is that the fixed costs for Shopify are very low. If you have your business in America, Shopify is probably a satisfying solution for your e-commerce.
Tech-savy Specials
- We integrated Facebook-connect with the store. The link “People” will get all members from the tjallamalla-facebook group, displaying their avatar and latest status-update in our framework. We thought it was a nice way to create a feeling of community among those who supports the brand. All images and text from facebook are displayed in the same manner as the clothes.
- The pictures are reziseble with your screen, always filling up 100% of the browser width (five pictures on one row). I made it with 100% CSS – no javascrips involved or ugly css hacks. When you scroll down, more images are added with jQuery Lazyloader – a smooth way to get rid of a boring pagination. Our goal was to build a cool wall of tjallamalla clothes and a intuitive navigation for the visitor. I think we succeeded with that and I´m glad that there are no flash involved.
- Overall the store is jammed with social media, feeds and share buttons.
Identity
tjallamalla is somewhere between a sleek acne-kind of store and a messy second-hand. We wanted the design to reflect that, it couldn´t look too “perfect”. Look at the clothes in the store and you´ll get a feeling for it – fashion AND Pippi Longstockings in the same package, kind of.
Team, Roles and My job
Harald Hammar (AD/Design)
Georgios Athannasiadis (project management and development)
Marc Andersson (development)
Me, Samuel Larsson (Design/AD/a little development + CSS)
Both me and Harald were involved with interaction design and art direction in the beginning of the project. Harald had the overall responsibility for look and feel. At the production-phase I designed a lot and wrote the CSS. Marc and Georgios made an awesome job to learn and integrate different tech-solutions with liquid. Georgios and me have had the most client contact, during the freelance period.
We are all behind the concept.
The Stats
During Januari 2010 tjallamalla.com had 19 978 visitors.
53% of them were new visitors.
Compared to other sites of tjallamalla.com´s proportion and similar business, tjallamalla have +370% visitors and minus 59% bounce rate. They have + 49% when it comes to how long time a visitor stays on tjallamalla.com.
Overall tjallamalla has raised their online sellings with 400% compared to the year before.
The Website
Wow, nice project! You must have worked with some talented people!
Way to go man! ;)
You bet!