Supermodel Gigi Hadid chooses Black & Black to launch her new cashmere heirloom label on Shopify Plus 2.0.
Guest in Residence’s Creative Director Gigi Hadid is one of the most famous people on the planet with 77 million followers on Instagram alone. The launch of her brand naturally would generate a huge amount of interest and the brand knew they had to have a best-in-class ecommerce platform that delivers reliability, performance and robust scalability.
$200k SALES ON DAY ONE
$200k SALES ON DAY ONE
With Shopify Plus the brand felt confident the platform could handle the high-volume traffic surges following posts on Gigi’s social accounts and provide a strong platform for growth.
Working with Shopify Plus Agency Partner Black & Black, Guest in Residence initially considered a headless technology stack to build an ecommerce store with a react frontend web app powered by Shopify Plus and Contentful CMS to achieve their goals of an extremely fast, robust and flexible store. However, with the launch of Shopify 2.0 upgrades, Black & Black felt confident that Guest in Residence could achieve incredible site speed, performance, frontend UX customization and a flexible content management without having to go the headless route and sticking with Shopify 2.0.
The benefits of going with a traditional monolithic architecture outweighed the headless approach in this instance to a large extent. For example, Shopify’s simple and intuitive native theme editor would have been lost had the brand decided on a headless architecture. In addition, with a monolithic Shopify architecture the brand could still use one-click install applications - with headless those applications would have had to be connected via the app APIs at considerable more time, cost and maintenance. In addition, cost of ongoing enhancements and maintenance with a Shopify monolithic architecture is considerable less than that of a headless architecture build.
With Shopify Plus, Guest in Residence saw results fast: