By 2024, the e-commerce fashion market is predicted to grow by over 50%, making up almost 20% of all online retail purchases. While there’s certainly profit to be made during the growth, helping your storefront stand out with compelling web design practices will attract more customers, new and old, that might otherwise get lost in the shopping shuffle.
We’ve chosen some of the best fashion sites
Take a closer look at how their branding and technical features encourage customers to stick around and convert!
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Dior
Despite being such a well-known brand, Dior’s site is impressively minimal. With graceful fonts, they stick to a black and white color scheme with vibrant images of their models and products to make them really pop. Since they have an abundance of products for different audiences, they separate navigating their more detailed categories into six general drop-down choices that are easy to find on the header bar and even have a concise little animation. As a luxury brand, they’re especially good at differentiating what men and women value about their products, offering golden-tinted images of pocketbooks, lipstick, and perfume for women, with black and white images advertising sporty wear and leather jackets for men.
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Zara
The Spanish clothing store Zara needs no introduction for many shoppers, but they have a distinct online presence that’s worth examining. The site’s homepage is surprisingly minimal, with just a few stylized banner images rotating on a center-page slider and their store icon and shopping categories keeping to the left side of the page. This is all deliberate: the specific and uniform size of the banner images and their font choices look exactly like a magazine cover on the rack. Even their product pages are like this, presenting product categories in grid-like blocks for the consistent feeling that you’re flipping through a designer journal from years past. Each photo is unique and shows off how they want you to feel about what’s being viewed individually rather than presenting products from exactly the same angles and distances.
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Verge Girl
An internationally-sold women’s online store, Verge’s style brings a tongue-in-cheek humor with a focus on breathable, summery clothes. With a scrapbook-like visual appearance, their homepage’s main image depicts the same models in various colors, styles, and physical expressions to give off the vibe that this is a brand about experimentation and finding just the right look for you. Their immediate calls to action are cleverly brought up, with “Shop Our Obsession” circled as if drawn long-hand to maintain that impression of youthful playfulness and malleability in style. Each of the most popular clothing types is given a homepage advertisement just in case customers already know what they’re generally looking for.
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Rolli Nation
As a specialty store focused on designer travel shoes, you might think Rolli’s site would have a lot of graphics and complex actions devoted to catching your eye, but they’re all about the fundamentals. With an almost entirely blank, white background, their site’s sections are partitioned with light red and blues with some simple and fun animations popping up to further describe product categories. Their “Let’s Be Soulmates” slogan goes well with their bright pastel imagery, giving their brand a “no frills, but still stylish” attitude. They want the site to focus on the concrete aspects of their products’ style and let that prioritization define their brand’s open and warm approach rather than teaching you how to navigate an unfamiliar-looking site.
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Olive Clothing
Olive is a UK-based fashion company focused on synthesizing traditional European styles with modern fashion. With very large central photos, their homepage images show serious-looking young models in autumn wear to describe what they mean by synthesis: long sleeve, complex earth tones from the past with more contemporary material and cuts. Most of their products are a single color or lightly patterned with another, so their site’s all-white background and heavily-spaced lettering for the font let’s their images do the talking. Their actual stock pages load very quickly and come with high-definition images that look realistic and fully zoom in so you can see the material.
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True Links Wear
Celebrating 10 years of success, True Links has a great approach to getting the essentials front-and-center. Originally a golf shoe company, their now multi-purpose shoes are supported by initial claims of free trials, same day shipping, and 30-day trials right on their homepage header bar. Their “Why True” section humorously describes how they research the best comfort practices for all their shoes so your foot is always in a natural-feeling position, and they display how that does and doesn’t look with a helpful graphic. They have a golf-focused, regularly updated blog with punchy writing and multi-angled product photos for everything they sell, not just the shoes!
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Maison Labiche
The French company Maison Labiche has an interesting focus: they design and sell embroidery products of all kinds, from t-shirts to socks to jackets. You can customize the embroidery text to be anything you want, and their site describes such with a “Do Your Own” section on the homepage. All their models wear season-specific pieces with text like “Passion” and “French Look” in a variety of embroidery fonts, including cursive and block to show some options for how they can make it look. They do especially good work providing very different styles on their homepage so unaware customers don’t get the impression that embroidery is only good for a single type of clothing or style.
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The Idle Man
A humorously-named international store that specializes in casual menswear, their site informs you about free deliveries from the header bar right away. They handpick clothes from multiple brands and have great general categories to separate different clothing types for easy shopping. Their blog posts are noticeably more analytical than your average storefront’s, delving into fashion’s association with music and other art forms, usually in reference to a new product or an emerging fashion trend to show why their company sells what it does when it does. Each piece is well chosen and goes with almost any other on the site, and their selection images thoroughly show the finer details for customers who want a closer look.
