Paul Smith Transforms Online Presence with Storyblok’s CMS

Leading designer label, Paul Smith, has partnered with enterprise headless CMS Storyblok to modernise and future-proof its digital retail presence.

Paul Smith - with the help of eCommerce specialist agency Limesharp - implemented Storyblok’s headless CMS technology within its eight-month deadline, and achieved an increased page speed of approximately 50%, along with higher conversion and revenue rates. 

To celebrate the business’ 50th anniversary, the Paul Smith team set out to transform the way they approach and communicate with their customers, re-establish their brand, and rebuild their website to emulate the unique customer experience of their flagship store in Los Angeles. Most importantly, the business wanted a solution to future-proof its online business and help it remain relevant for the next fifty years. 

Paul Smith’s team developed the new back-end internally, while Limesharp built the front-end. By implementing Storyblok’s technology, Paul Smith’s content teams are now benefiting from more flexibility and are able to update designs and layouts, schedule content, implement bulk updates, and access data in multiple ways all by themselves. 

With Storyblok and headless technology, Paul Smith was able to connect its CMS with a vast array of external apps, such as Larevel for middleware, Magento for eCommerce, Cloudinary for digital asset management (DAM), and Klevu for search, product recommendations and visual merchandising.

Thanks to this digital transformation, Paul Smith won the Best Digital Experience award from the MACH Impact Awards 2023, and a Digital Innovation award from the Retail TouchPoints 2023 Brand Experience Awards.

Hannah Bennet, head of digital at Paul Smith, said: “When we decided to switch to a headless CMS, we had a lengthy review process of headless platforms, analysing Contentful, Prismic, and GraphCMS among others. We wanted to find the right mix of composable architecture, easy integrations, ease of use, and flexibility.

“We found that Storyblok was the most established vendor with great developer support. Storyblok also has some fantastic unique features, such as the visual editor. It supports improved performance and provides our teams so much flexibility and freedom. It was an easy decision to make.”

Dominik Angerer, co-founder and CEO of Storyblok, said: “At a time of economic uncertainty, the role of flexible and efficient marketing with a high ROI is becoming increasingly important as businesses seek to respond to new requirements and trends with agility. 

“Our recent work with Paul Smith is a perfect example of this. The vast capabilities afforded by our headless CMS architecture enabled its legendary brand to achieve a new online look, recreating the customer experience from its unique physical stores. It also places the business in a good position to easily evolve its digital presence with new tech innovations.”