Paul Smith Brings Its Flagship Stores to Virtual Life

• Headquarters: Nottingham, United Kingdom
• Technology Stack: Centra, Storyblok, Vue.js, Laravel, Cloudinary, Klevu, & AWS

Globally-renowned iconic British fashion brand, Paul Smith (opens in a new window), has been celebrated for its quality and craftsmanship since 1970. After 50 years in the industry across over 60 countries, they recognized that certain parts of the business were in need of some modern tailoring. With a little help from their partnership with Limesharp (opens in a new window) and a series of tech partners, Paul Smith redirected their famed creative thinking into sprucing up their digital offering. Transforming how they approach and communicate with their customers, re-establishing their brand for today’s market, and rebuilding their website to reflect the customer experience of their bricks-and-mortar flagship stores. The final product: a 50% increase in page performance post-launch, a 0.8s First Contentful Paint (opens in a new window), and a 92 SEO Lighthouse score–not too shabby.

Tackling custom-built problems

Innovators to their core, the Paul Smith team previously used their own custom-built CMS platform, but it quickly went out of fashion in their quest to recreate the experience of their flagship stores online. But why, exactly? 

• Performance issues: Monolithic CMS setups, custom-built or off-the-shelf, often face performance challenges due to their tightly coupled nature and inability to support a Jamstack architecture. In Paul Smith’s previous architecture, the content management system and the presentation layer were interconnected, resulting in slower page load times and performance bottlenecks. 
• Lack of composable architecture: Unlike a headless CMS, the monolithic CMS lacks a composable architecture. The predefined templates and structures limit the flexibility to customize or adapt to changing business requirements. While the tightly coupled nature of the architecture hinders the ability to easily add or replace components, integrate new technologies, or leverage specialized services. This lack of composability brought on restrictions in scalability and using best-of-breed technologies. 
• Limited integrations: The limited support for APIs made it hard to connect the CMS with third-party applications, marketing automation tools, eCommerce platforms, or analytics solutions. The lack of flexible integration capabilities hampered the ability to create seamless, connected experiences across different channels and touchpoints.
• Inflexibility and customization constraints: Content creators and developers were bound by predefined templates, structures, and technologies dictated by the CMS. This rigid framework restricted the ability to tailor the content management process and the frontend experiences according to the specific organizational needs, and any modifications or customizations required significant effort. 

The search was over for a CMS that could keep up

The Paul Smith team rightly didn’t just jump onto the first headless CMS they found to replace their old custom-built setup. They took their time. Reviewed all options. Thoroughly analyzing the market leads — Contentful, Prismic, Hygraph — to find the goldilocks mix of composable architecture, simple integrations, ease of use, and flexibility. And the winner was….*drum roll*....yep, you guessed it: Storyblok, of course. So, what swayed Paul Smith to go with us? 

• Good developer support: Extensive documentation, tutorials, and a developer community assist users in leveraging the platform effectively and ensure developers have the necessary resources and guidance to create and manage content seamlessly.
• Visual editor: Content creators can see changes in real-time, preview content across various devices, and ensure the consistency and quality of their digital experiences without relying on complex coding processes.
• Scheduling capabilities: The ability to set specific dates and times for content to go live or expire, allowing users to effortlessly manage time-sensitive campaigns or time-bound content releases. This feature enhances workflow efficiency and ensures a seamless user experience by automating content updates according to predetermined schedules.
• Bulk updates: Through API and import/export functionalities, users can easily perform bulk operations, such as updating multiple pieces of content simultaneously. This saves significant time and effort, especially when managing large amounts of content or making global changes across the website.
• Set-up for improved performance: By leveraging a headless architecture, the platform decouples content from the presentation layer, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability. Developers can optimize performance by delivering content via APIs, which reduces page load times and provides a faster, more responsive user experience.

As masters in fashion design and excellence, Paul Smith was ready to integrate that reputation into a unique web experience for its users. Maintaining their classic UX and UI but elevating the customer journey with signature design elements to bring their flagship store experience to virtual life. They wanted to implement a live chat function, a fresh design that echoes Paul Smith’s brand voice of artful independence, quirky Golden Rabbit emblem, a list of varied services, and out-of-the-box shopping categories to achieve an immersive web journey that lives up to the Paul Smith legacy. Let’s take a look at how they achieved exactly that.

How do we stay relevant for the next 50 years?

With half a century of success already under their belt, the Paul Smith team was looking to the future and asking themselves, “How do we stay relevant for the next 50 years as well?” And the answer to that was their eCommerce offering. Research by SellersCommerce revealed that 21% of all global retail purchases in 2025 were done online, with that number projected to reach 22.6% by 2027. Meaning that for Paul Smith to compete in the already competitive fashion market, they had to evolve their digital offering and think outside the box. Leading them to seek out external technical and eCommerce expertise to support their internal development team and its goals.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without some good old-fashioned collaboration, particularly with Paul Smith’s agency partner, Limesharp. A fully remote agency with offices in the UK, New Zealand, and Auckland, and 15 years of eCommerce expertise in fashion, luxury, and premium brands. Limesharp’s strength lies in crafting simple, refined customer experiences that reflect each brand’s DNA, a skillset that has served them well in their 3-year collaboration with Paul Smith so far. 

And the love is very much mutual. From the Limesharp team’s perspective, Paul Smith is a pretty perfect partner: kind, creative, with a lovely team leading amazing products, what more could you ask for? The two teams quickly became one strong collaborative unit working to pioneer Paul Smith’s values as Britain’s leading independent design company: curiosity and creativity. Values that underpin their designs, shops, collaborations, and now their digital experience.

From design to execution: getting started with a web makeover

From the very start, Paul Smith was set on building their website on a headless CMS with composable architecture—sounds like a stellar idea if you ask us. After deciding on the tech stack, Limesharp, together with Paul Smith, collaborated on a discovery phase, identifying the objectives in terms of customers and brand. The main objective, as mentioned, was to recreate the customer experience from their physical flagship stores. But they also set their targets on improving assets, adding more information through multimedia files, introducing editorials, and sprinkling in some extra-special finishing touches. 

The 8-month development process took place in a hybrid mode, where the back-end was developed by Paul Smith, while Limesharp implemented the front-end. The go-live went according to the release planning (round of applause, please), and then the teams got into the pixel-perfecting stage, adding new functionalities based on the existing structure, before arriving at the standout web experience they deliver today.

The tech stack: leveraging AI and video content in eCommerce

There’s no great website without great developers. With the goal clearly laid out, both Paul Smith and Limesharp’s teams dove into the world of composable stack and MACH Alliance to learn what worked best for what they wanted to achieve. 

The Limesharp team is well-versed in Vue.js, so naturally this was their framework of choice. From this, they built a powerful tech stack consisting of Laravel for middleware, Centra for eCommerce, Cloudinary for digital asset management (DAM), Klevu for search recommendations and visual merchandising, and Storyblok as the CMS to handle all the content.

Leveraging a combination of AWS services like EC2, S3, and Cloudfront, this project is a shining example of the importance of e-retailers building innovative, immersive digital experiences to compete in today’s market. A composable architecture approach is key to achieving such advanced, customizable experiences that audiences have come to expect—think of it as rolling out the red carpet runway for every single visitor. 

In particular, Klevu was the star of the show as it helps connect people to products they want to buy. Their services include eCommerce personalization, AI, and NLP-powered on-site Smart Search, Smart Category Merchandising, and Smart Recommendations powered by real-time buyer intent. Their Smart Search with advanced natural language processing quickly generates search results even with misspellings, typos, and long specific queries to direct relevant, intent-tailored customers to the Paul Smith site.   

The category merchandising tool allows retailers to fine-tune product results using easy-to-apply strategic rules, product pinning and exclusion, and simple drag-and-drop interfaces, allowing full control over what customers see, or they can let AI handle that magic. Klevu’s Smart Recommendations allow retailers to optimize product recommendations with data from their own shoppers, creating a custom shopping experience. Since Paul Smith was already using Klevu on their previous, monolithic platform, it leaned on Klevu’s AI to maximize conversion and revenue during the transformation and migration to Storyblok. Klevu also enabled Paul Smith to reach its desired customer journey through optimized product discovery. As a brand, Paul Smith has learned to trust the AI to deliver the right product and content results to its shoppers, manually merchandising as lightly as possible and freeing up its development team to focus on building new experiences, rather than tedious content tasks. 

In terms of asset management, Paul Smith relies on Cloudinary for automating and optimizing new and efficient approaches to the way Paul Smith handles its vast library of high-quality fashion imagery, and sells online. Cloudinary is the central element of Paul Smith's digital image workflow, linking various members of the creative team, including photographers and marketers. The team leverages Cloudinary to effortlessly handle images by implementing a naming match feature that automatically assigns a SKU in Adobe Commerce. The result: Paul Smith has achieved a minimum 40% reduction in time spent on image management. While the utilization of Cloudinary has enabled them to easily incorporate a greater amount of video content into their sales strategy, a pivotal factor for eCommerce success today. With statistics like product pages featuring videos can experience an up to 80% (opens in a new window) increase in conversion rates compared to those without videos, the numbers really do speak for themselves.

The Paul Smith glow up 

As part of the website rebuild, Limesharp created a suite of components, supported the content team and designers in using those components, and encouraged them to step outside of their comfort zone. And all that work paid off. 

The content team is now very familiar with Storyblok and its functionalities, coming up with ideas and feature requests to make our CMS even better. Overall, life has become easier for the content team, benefiting from more flexibility, freedom, and autonomy as they’re able to update designs and layouts and schedule content themselves faster. And it’s not just the content creators who are happier. The developers love the out-of-the-box Cloudinary integration and appreciate that the Storyblok support team is always on hand to help when they run into an issue.

In terms of measurable results, the hard work and good decisions paid off. Post-launch, Limesharp registered a page load time reduced by approximately 50% as they stripped out third parties and unused libraries, making the code leaner, and using pre-loading. But the work isn’t over yet, as the Limesharp team is in the process of improving the Largest Contentful Paint for an even better web experience for Paul Smith audiences. 

The moral of this success story is that strong collaboration, great design, and a powerful tech stack can deliver measurable results that enable you to stand out from the crowd and stay in vogue, no matter how eCommerce evolves.