For more than a hundred years, British heritage fashion brand Belstaff has established a legacy built on craftsmanship and exceptional service. In its centenary year, the brand faced a pivotal moment: redefining how it connected with customers online, whilst ensuring its values of quality, trust, and personal service translated into a digital shopping experience.
Following a deliberate development pause to complete a migration to a modern, headless ecommerce architecture, Belstaff needed to unlock the full potential of the new platform in ways that would resonate with long-standing customers and a new generation of global shoppers.
The approach focused on analysing customer behaviours and using data-led insight to guide confident decision-making. Deep analysis of user interactions across the site enabled us to develop a clear optimisation framework for the brand to prioritise changes that would deliver tangible commercial impact.
To drive urgency and increase conversion, we introduced personalised countdown timers on product detail pages, paired with targeted upsells for Next Day Delivery. This resulted in a 30% increase in customers selecting NDD over standard shipping.
By analysing how users interacted with product imagery, we optimised shot selection and presentation across key categories. This not only improved engagement, but also streamlined studio output, recouping significant annual production costs.
Alongside this, we implemented a sophisticated product recommendation engine, tailored by user type, affinity, purchase history, and real-time session behaviour. This layer of personalisation generated substantial assisted conversions and reinforced ease of discovery for customers.
Finally, we established a structured, hypothesis-led testing framework that embedded a culture of experimentation across teams. This empowered Belstaff to move faster, make confident, data-driven decisions, and continuously optimise based on real customer insights.
Matt’s approach has delivered a fresh, compelling ecommerce experience that successfully balances Belstaff’s heritage with digital innovation. The foundations have been laid to give our teams confidence to make the right decisions to ensure measurable growth, whilst strengthening our customers’ trust in the brand.
Stacey Smith - Head of E-Commerce | Belstaff
