FASHION
Planet Blue Launches New Site, Same-Day Delivery
Planet Blue is taking e-commerce to the next level. The Los Angeles–area multi-store retailer relaunched its website (www.shopplanetblue.com) and now offers same-day shipping in select areas of Southern California. Soon, it will begin offering free international shipping to 100 countries.
Vice President of E-commerce Eugene Kang was hired in March to relaunch the 5-year-old site, which generates approximately 25 percent of the retail chain’s overall business.
“One of my biggest initiatives was to figure out ways to tangibly grow our business and trajectory. I definitely saw a lot of opportunity to improve our site experience,” said Kang, who formerly managed e-commerce at Forever 21. Key features on the new site include aesthetic improvements as well as functionalities that make the shopping experience easier, such as navigation, filtering, one-page checkout and, most importantly, responsive design.
“One of the major [trends] we are seeing—as well as what all e-commerce or retailers are experiencing—is a shift toward mobile,” he explained. “Thirty to 40 percent of Planet Blue’s customer base visits the site through their mobile device. So we needed to respond to that.”
The site is now optimized for mobile devices and tablets.
Site features such as lookbooks and social components, including a “Selfie Centered” Instagram campaign, are key to branding and sales.
Users can upload and tag images of themselves wearing clothing purchased at Planet Blue. In addition, social content gets redistributed in the digital space, which ultimately expands the brand’s reach and traffic.
“Our particular customer base is very social,” Kang said. “So we thought it was very important to incorporate that component into our website.”
Delivered same day
By offering same-day delivery, Planet Blue joins a small group of pioneering e-tailers, including giant Amazon.com, which has been building distribution centers in California to be able to offer same-day service, and Net-a-Porter, which offers same-day delivery in the New York and select New Jersey areas.
“We were seeing a good amount of overnight orders locally,” Kang said. “Also, we naturally have a high concentration of our customer base in Los Angeles, and our warehouse is local, too. It made a lot of sense for us from a logistic standpoint to achieve that.”
The Planet Blue team built the service from scratch with developers on the existing e-commerce platform and partnered with DeliverLA to create the courier-style delivery service.
“It was definitely a lot of work to find the right partner and to develop the technology, [to put] the systems and processes in place, and even the policies of how we wanted to approach it,” Kang said.
Delivery is available to zip codes within a set geographical radius, ranging approximately from Santa Monica in the west to Pasadena in the east, and Burbank in the north to Manhattan Beach in the south. Orders must be placed by 11 a.m. and are guaranteed delivery by 6 p.m. The service is available for a fixed $19.99 fee, and product is shipped from Planet Blue’s local warehouse. Customers can return orders to the warehouse within 30 days for a full refund or return them to any physical retail location for store credit.
According to Kang, the highest usage of the service so far is on Fridays, when people are gearing up for the weekend, and for special events such as weddings.
Global reach
Preparing for international growth, Planet Blue has partnered with Borderfree, a technology and services platform that will soon allow the retailer to ship to 100 countries around the globe. Currently, the retailer ships to 39 countries, so the expansion will more than double Planet Blue’s reach.
“That’s a really important piece [of the growth plan] because we’re seeing a growing amount of traffic and buyers internationally,” said Kang, who added that the international interest in the store is related to Planet Blue’s physical retail stores, which are located in typically touristy destinations. After tourists visit, they go back to their home countries, place more orders and tell their friends.
“We’ve organically grown our international customer base, but we’ve been challenged to ship to them in an affordable and also speedy fashion,” Kang said. Working with Borderfree, Planet Blue will be able to offer free shipping worldwide on orders over $100. “Our average order is over $200, so it’s not a big barrier anyway, but we think that will be pretty compelling,” Kang said. “We get a lot of traffic from Australia, the U.K., Canada, Japan [where we have stores] as well as China.”
