Queensmith, an award-winning British jeweler, chose imgix to optimize its growing catalog of images. With imgix, Queensmith reduced image sizes by an average of 63%, enhanced the responsive design, and automated the previously tedious and manual image resize process.
The Customer
Queensmith offers premium jewelry, such as engagement and wedding rings, that are ethically made at a fair price. Queensmith has a unique customer appeal in an extremely competitive industry based on its quality, craftsmanship, and customer service. Combined with a seamless online experience, Queensmith has seen a 50% increase in monthly revenue from 2022 to 2023 and a growing number of US customers attracted by the affordability of UK jewelry for the same quality.
"We strike a balance between luxury and accessibility. It’s important for our customers to feel that their jewelry is premium and bespoke. And we need an image experience that matches it."
- Harry Harrison, Head of Web and IT and Queensmith
The Challenge
Queensmith's website serves around 180,000 Origin images, with 25 million image requests monthly. Responsive design is a crucial goal for the company, as 66% of their visits occurred on mobile devices.
Before using imgix to create a responsive web experience, the content team had to manually crop and resize each image and create a dozen variants. This labor-intensive process still didn’t solve the daunting needs of ever-expanding combinations of devices, browsers, and bandwidth environments. As the product catalog grew, it became extremely difficult for the content team to keep up with the image optimization needs.
In the meantime, the company relied on Shopify's native CDN, which lacked advanced image optimization features and didn't support next-gen image formats like AVIF or WebP.
"It would be impossible to ask our content team to crop, generate, and upload many variants for every image on the website. I needed something that would make the process easy for my teammates and me. That’s the only way I can sleep at night."
- Harry Harrison, Head of Web and IT and Queensmith
The Solution
When Queensmith learned about imgix’s image Rendering API and CDN, the team was pleased to see how easy image processing and distribution can be. The quick deployment, the compatibility with AWS S3, and seamless integration with CraftCMS made imgix an ideal choice. Some of the key features Queensmith uses are:
- auto=format determines and serves images in the best format through automatic content negotiation. AVIF is used for browsers that support it, as it’s the most performant image file format. And the fall-back logic ensures that the next best format is chosen if the user browser doesn’t support AVIF or WebP.
- W and srcset render different-sized images based on the browser viewport width.
- crop=focalpoint centers the image on three coordinates, horizontal (fp-x), vertical (fp-y), and/or zoom (fp-z) value, and crop from there.
"It’s very easy. The setup took only 5 minutes. It just works."
- Harry Harrison, Head of Web and IT and Queensmith
The Results
Using imgix, Queensmith has reduced image sizes by 63% on average, ensuring fast page loading speed without compromising the image quality. The average image response time is just 57 milliseconds. Implementing imgix has led to several benefits for Queensmith:
- Time savings: instead of doing the tedious image cropping and resizing, the Queensmith content team can now create a single high-resolution version for each image and let imgix dynamically reformat and resize it for different user environments.
- Ease of use: the initial setup took only five minutes. With intuitive features and documentation, the Queensmith team can experiment and make further adjustments without extra support.
With imgix, Queensmith has successfully transformed its image process, ensuring a seamless and responsive experience for its customers. The easy-to-use solution not only simplified the workflow for the team but has also reduced image sizes significantly, contributing to a faster and more enjoyable browsing experience for customers.
