Pretty Lavish

At a glance

• Client: Pretty Lavish, a British fashion brand
• Sector: Fashion, retail and e-commerce
• Platforms: iOS and Android
• What we did: native mobile app design and build, the full product catalogue, and push notification messaging controlled by the Pretty Lavish marketing team
• Engagement: end-to-end app project for an established e-commerce brand
• Headline result: marketing messages read 80% of the time, up from 30%

The challenge

Pretty Lavish were not short of demand. They had a successful e-commerce website and a community that already knew the brand. The gap was the speed at which they could reach it.

Fashion retail runs on drops, restocks and short windows. A collection lands, sells through, and the moment passes. A website is passive by nature: it only reaches customers when they decide to visit. Marketing sent by email competes in a crowded inbox and gets read late, if it gets read at all. Pretty Lavish needed a way to put a message in front of their customer base within minutes rather than days.

Browsing was the other half of the problem. A fashion catalogue is image-heavy by nature, and the mobile web makes customers wait on that imagery on every visit. There was no permanent home for the brand on the customer’s phone, and nothing to bring a shopper back between campaigns. Turning web visitors into loyal, repeat customers meant owning both the browsing experience and the channel used to prompt it.

What we designed and built

We designed and built a native app for iOS and Android, so the experience is the same whichever phone a customer carries.

The full Pretty Lavish catalogue lives inside the app. Nothing is held back for the website, so a customer who commits to the app never has to leave it to see the whole range. That was a deliberate decision: an app only earns a place on the home screen if it is the better place to shop, not a cut-down version of the site. Browsing is built around the product photography, because in fashion the image does most of the work of the product page.

The piece the Pretty Lavish team uses daily is the messaging capability. We gave them the ability to write and send push notifications to their customer base directly, without coming back to us. Messages can be sent instantly, the moment a drop goes live or a sold-out piece comes back into stock, or scheduled ahead for a planned campaign. That combination is what makes the channel genuinely useful: reactive when the moment demands it, planned when the calendar allows it, and landing on the home screen rather than in an inbox.

The results

The clearest measure is engagement with marketing messages. Before the app, Pretty Lavish’s marketing messages were read around 30% of the time. Delivered through the app, they are read 80% of the time.

Put plainly: eight in ten of the people they message now read it, where previously it was three in ten. The same team, writing the same kind of messages, reaching a far larger share of the audience. For a brand whose sales depend on being seen in the hours after a drop, that is the difference between a campaign working and a campaign being missed.

Alongside that, the app has passed 35,000 downloads and holds a 5-star overall rating. Pretty Lavish have since been stocked in Selfridges, Next and ASOS, and the app has helped to support that growth.

Frequently asked

How do you increase engagement in a retail app?

Give the brand a channel it controls, and give the customer a reason to open the app. For Pretty Lavish that meant push notifications the marketing team can fire instantly or schedule themselves, tied to the moments that actually matter in fashion retail: drops, restocks and short campaigns. Engagement follows relevance and timing far more than it follows frequency, so sending more is rarely the answer and sending at the right moment usually is.

What does an app build or redesign involve for a fashion brand?

It starts with what the brand already has. Pretty Lavish had a proven e-commerce website, so the job was not to invent a proposition but to translate it onto the device the customer keeps in their pocket, with the full catalogue, photography that stays true to the brand, and a direct line to the customer. A redesign follows the same path: work out what is already working, find where customers are dropping out, then rebuild those journeys rather than restyling everything and hoping.

How do you design for browsing versus buying?

They are two different mindsets and they need different treatment. Browsing is visual and open-ended, so it wants large imagery, easy movement between pieces, and no sense of having committed to anything. Buying is narrow and wants certainty, so it needs clear product detail and the shortest sensible path to completing the order. The apps that work let customers move between the two without ever feeling they have started a process they cannot back out of.

Related services

Pretty Lavish already had an e-commerce site that worked; the app was a new build alongside it rather than a replacement. If you are at that point, how much app design costs in the UK sets out what a first version of a retail app realistically involves. A free UX audit of your current mobile journey is a sensible check beforehand. You can read more about working with an app design agency in London, or get started when you are ready.