Hermes Tie App & the Temperley’s Interactive E-Commerce Video !

www.temperleylondon.com

The message has gotten through and high fashion brands are finally trying to up their digital game. Conventional wisdom says they waited so long because they wanted to make sure the result had the same gorgeous values as their products, but was that the right decision?

Having seen and tried two new products, Temperley London’s ballyhooed “shoppable video” and Hermès’s new tie app, I’d say the jury is still out. One is great, one has some issues. To be specific:

The Temperley film, titled “White Magic,” runs 1 minute and 49 seconds, and was made in conjunction with Net-a-Porter, where you buy the stuff, and Cinematique, which has made something of a specialty out of creating shoppable video. It has worked with Maiyet, Petit Bateau and Alexander Wang in the past, and have a Gap Kids video about to release.

With the Temperley film, you press the play button and a kind of music/video/narrative unfolds. When you like a garment or want to find out more about, say, the library, you hover over the item and click on it, adding it to your “click list.” At the end of the video (or in the middle, if you are tired of watching), you click the list icon and are taken to a new screen, which is like a dressing room with all your chosen items. Click one and you get a closer look and a description. Click the “Buy Now” button, and you are moved into Net-a-Porter’s buying process. (Put it in bag, check out, etc.)

www.temperleylondon.com

So, all in all, at least six clicks from first sight until you actually purchase the item (and then you have to go back and check out the rest), which to my mind is a bit less than ideal. When I was imagining the process, I was imagining a situation where you watch the video, click the item, the video pauses, you get to see/put that number in your basket in one go, and then buy. So, half the clicks. Makes more sense to me, from a user perspective.

As for the video itself, it was directed by Alice Temperley and shot by her brother, Henry, and sister, Matilda, at Alice’s famous (in Britain) annual summer house party, which is often pictured in glossy magazines and involves a lot of beautiful Temperley friends in beautiful clothes and costumes romping in the beautiful setting of her parents’ country home. It’s a very effective lure into the Temperley world (who wouldn’t want that life, at least for a weekend?), but a less than effective shopping tool.

The problem is that it moves too fast to let you get a good glimpse of the clothes and decide whether you want them — or even to click on them for that matter. It was only on my third go round that I managed to click on one red ribbon dress when it was on screen, and while I admit that could be down to my lame technological abilities, I don’t think I am that far off the norm.

Given what we know about online viewers’ attention spans, three times is a lot to ask someone to watch the same video to get information on a dress they might or might not like when they see all of it, as opposed to what’s visible when the model is leaning over a bannister. In the end, the production values get in the way of the retail values.

An image from the Temperley London interactive video. The white dot indicates the viewer has clicked on the dress to get more information.

Meanwhile, the Hermès tie app, “Tie Break” is available at Apple iTunes and Google Play — and follows its first app last year, “Silk Knots,” which was all about the scarf line and thus far has had about 203,000 downloads. It sounds a bit ridiculous (a tie app? really?) but is surprisingly charming. And easy to use.

It has a combination of GIFs, or graphic interchange formats — bird patterns that become planes, for example — and useful information like a chart for how to knot a tie correctly; or how to drape a scarf in that perfectly imperfect way that French men appear to have, well, perfected; plus samples of every single one of the fashion house’s very many tie patterns, which can be enlarged and held up against a shirt to see if the combo works. (O.K., holding a phone against a shirt and holding an actual tie against a shirt is not exactly the same thing, but it’s better than nothing.) The app is both functional and — the holy grail of digital — funny.

Plus it has games. Games! For playing on the subway. Or while waiting for your hot dog. And that, for one of the most classic of French brands, is a pretty smart move.

Indeed, it indicates that Hermès may have more of a future online than had been thought, especially given that it developed the tie app in-house. Which makes me think the house ought to do a lot more of this, a lot faster. Bring on the bag app! We are a-waitin’.

ref: runway.blogs.nytimes.com