French ready-to-wear clothing brand, Zadig&Voltaire, imagines a new type of luxury - one that balances authenticity and warmth. They chose imgix to convey this luxury through high-quality images. imgix improves page speed by 66%, reduces engineering time and costs, while continuing to deliver a high-end customer experience
Page speed improvement
Images viewed on mobile devices
Image delivery success
The Customer
They say that luxury never goes out of fashion. French ready-to-wear clothing brand, Zadig&Voltaire, was born from imagining a new type of luxury - one that broke from the traditional definition of the sector, balancing authenticity and warmth. Ranking as the second-largest fashion brand in France by revenue with 378 stores operating across the globe, the company’s approach to luxury - expressed in an effortless and chic style - spans the end-to-end customer experience.
“Zadig&Voltaire is a brand with a strong image,” said director of marketing and digital, Jonathan Attali. For e-commerce, the journey begins with images. “Everything at Zadig&Voltaire is about desire - the desire, the image, and the value,” Jonathan Attali, Director of Marketing and Digital, said. “So the place of the image in our global strategy for the next few years – and also for the last 25 years – it’s very important.”
The Challenge
Providing high-quality images without compromising on delivery performance became a priority for the company. Whether their customers used a portable phone or desktop computer, Zadig&Voltaire wanted to ensure the experience across the board reflected both the accessibility and luxury that is a hallmark of their products.
Lacking an effective imaging solution meant spending unnecessary resources on cumbersome developer workflows and repetitive tasks. In addition, poorly sized or cropped images with sub-par quality, created a bad visual experience. And slow page-load speed negatively impacted SEO rankings and website conversion rates.
The Solution
Zadig&Voltaire decided to use imgix for their image optimization solution, applying srcsets on their PDP (Product Details Page) and PLP (Product Listings Page) pages. This allowed images to appear at the most optimal size for each device and screen environment.
Working closely with their imgix Account Management and support teams to implement these changes ensured they were using imgix optimally. With the goal of having a responsive website and top-class image delivery, Zadig&Voltaire found the simplicity of onboarding and managing imgix’s solution to be incredibly attractive.
“At the end, you just upload one picture and you just manage it. You manage the performance and you don’t need any developers to manage it. For example, if we just wanted to increase or decrease the quality level of an image, we can do it by ourselves in two minutes in the back office. So, it’s very simple, not too technical, but very flexible.”
— Jonathan Attali, Director of Marketing and Digital
This ease of use, backed by the powerful imgix Rendering API, was important to Zadig & Voltaire.
After comparing different image solutions, Zadig&Voltaire chose imgix. And the fact that imgix went above and beyond CDN hosting capabilities really helped move the needle for Zadig&Voltaire.
“Of course, there's a lot of tech behind it, but in the end, it's a tool for which I don't need special skills for myself or a member of the business team to just change the quality of any picture. So it's a very technical solution, but it can be used by any team, not just the developer or the CTO.”
— Jonathan Attali, Director of Marketing and Digital
Some of the imgix parameters that Zadig&Voltaire use include:
- q enable setting output quality lower than the default when serving high-DPR images.
- cs specifies the color space of the output image.
- lossless enables delivery of lossless images in formats that support lossless compression (JPEG XR and WEBP).
- fit controlled the way the output image fits to its target dimensions after resizing and how background areas get filled.
- auto helps to automate a baseline level of optimization across your entire image catalog.
“imgix is not just a server that hosts some images,” Attali said. “ The knowledge and the data to best optimize website images is imgix’s job. We could have gone with any other solution - GCP, Google Platform - but they are not experts like imgix.”
One very important consideration for Zadig&Voltaire was their implementation of the Progressive Web Application. A Progressive Web App, or PWA for short, is a website designed to create user experiences closer to mobile-native than in-browser ones. By design, PWAs are optimized to create a smooth and fast experience for users.
“It’s only one load of the page and after that, you click, but you never load all the content and all CSS, etc. The only thing that changes on each page is the image, because if you have the same CSS on the website, you don’t load it again,” Attali explained. “So between the homepage, PLP, then PDP, the main change you have to load is the image.”
Because of this, he noted, loading a page requires having the image correctly optimized in order to keep the experience seamless for the user.
“So performance and response time of imgix was very important when we chose the PWA for the front.”
The Results
Implementing imgix, Zadig&Voltaire not only delivered on their mission of providing a luxurious experience for their customers across the digital sphere, but also saved engineering time and costs while optimizing their website performance on the backend.
“The engineering time before was catastrophic,” Attali recalled. “After this change, we didn’t have any new development around the image, because once it’s correctly implemented on the website, we just manage it directly through imgix.”
Once the team had onboarded imgix, Zadig&Voltaire also saw an immediate and huge impact on web performance. The page speed index on desktops was around 15 to 16 seconds. After implementing imgix, Zadig & Voltaire reduced that time to around 6 seconds - a 66% improvement.
“If we are able to speed up the success of those pages, it means content is getting to customers that much faster,” Attali said.
And providing that type of luxury experience for their users will always be in vogue.
