Isabella Oliver and Baukjen inspire customer journeys with Bazaarvoice Galleries

Isabella Oliver is a London-based maternity clothing brand. The brand was created when founder Baukjen de Swaan Arons was pregnant and looking for stylish, ethical, and sustainable maternity wear but wasn’t able to find anything that fit her needs. Today, Isabella Oliver focuses on clothing designed for good and has a loyal following of pregnant women in the UK and around the world. Customers love the clothes so much that they wanted to keep wearing similar styles when they weren’t pregnant anymore. This is how the Baukjen brand was born.

Moving from URL to IRL

Isabella Oliver and Baukjen have primarily been online stores since their conceptions. However, the two brands recently started selling their clothes in retail stores across the UK, including John Lewis & Partners.

Because they still sell primarily online, it’s extremely important to the brand that customers can virtually “try on” clothes before purchasing. Up until recently, the brand relied on professional imagery to show off its clothes. And while perfectly poised photos are beautiful, some customers wanted to see more before making a purchase. Isabella Oliver and Baukjen realized that customers wanted to see how their products looked on a variety of bodies to get a better idea of how the clothing items would look on them.

“We need to have a variety of people trying on our clothes and sharing images,” said Mattinson.

Turning competition into visual UGC curation

Visual user-generated content (UGC) was the answer. Visual UGC, like photos or videos from other shoppers, helps set shopper expectations and reassures them that they’re buying the right product. Social proof is a beautiful thing.

Mattinson created a monthly hashtag competition for people to share their #Baukjenstyle. Shoppers get to show off their style, and Baukjen gets a wealth of customer photos. A win-win.

“We’re always encouraging people to share what they’ve bought from us and are wearing on Instagram and Facebook,” said Mattinson. “We pick one winner a month, and then sometimes we pick a few of our favorites from the month and share a selection of what people have been wearing.”

Isabella Oliver and Baukjen use Bazaarvoice Galleries to showcase these customer images from social media on their product pages, homepage, and email campaigns. Galleries makes it easier for Mattinson to quickly select and display her favorite images.

“I can see every single image in one place. Then, I go through and select images to appear on product pages or home pages. We are also featuring these galleries in our email marketing. We send these out three or four times a week,” said Mattinson.

The brands also work with the Bazaarvoice client services team to brainstorm new strategies and ways to utilize Bazaarvoice Galleries to showcase more of the UGC they’re getting and see more results from the content.

Driving high-impact results with visual UGC

The brands have received feedback from customers that the visual UGC is making them feel more confident in what they’re buying.

“We definitely get feedback from people saying, ‘I’ve seen this product on someone else, and then bought it because I have a similar body type or build like them,’” said Mattinson.

They have also done A/B testing with email campaigns with galleries in the email and galleries not in the email. The brands found that emails with galleries brought in higher revenue.

From analyzing the time on site and looking at the average order value, the brands can also see that orders are higher if someone has interacted with either the homepage gallery or product page galleries. Bazaarvoice sees conversion rates increase by up to 150% when visitors interact with images displayed with Galleries.