No more guessing games: GUESS lands optimized images every time with Cloudinary on AWS

Today’s shoppers have seemingly endless retail options online—to the point where many have ditched the in-store experience altogether. Competition is fierce. Once a customer finds their way to a website, it’s never been more important to keep them there. One of the quickest ways to lose them is a website that’s weighed down by poor-quality or slow-loading images. A sluggish website leads to frustrated customers, abandoned shopping carts, and a lack of confidence in the products—or worse—the brand itself.

With thousands of shoppers visiting its website every day, global lifestyle brand GUESS experienced this challenge firsthand and knew it was time to modernize its image management system. Glitchy, slow-loading images created bottlenecks on the website, which was frustrating for customers and a huge pain point for the GUESS creative team and developers who were spending countless hours creating workarounds for its Flash-reliant image management software, Adobe Scene7. Since modern browsers have phased out Flash, GUESS needed a new solution that would address both the front-end and backend hurdles.

The GUESS team found its solution in AWS Retail Competency Partner Cloudinary, a powerful media experience platform. Cloudinary not only improved the page performance through image optimization but also boosted conversions.

Here’s how GUESS took the guesswork out of creating an image management system so that it could focus on what it does best: providing apparel and accessories to more than 80 countries around the world.

Gone in a Flash: Ditching the outdated, time-consuming image platforms

Imagine your developers or creative teams spending countless, tiring hours manually uploading product images and retrofitting them for an antiquated asset management system only to have the result be consistently flawed. “Even before browsers stopped supporting Flash, we had many concerns about image optimization, page speed, and overall bloat that the system was adding,” said Sasha Mattison, senior front-end developer and user experience manager for GUESS. “Optimized images were often heavier than the originals we uploaded.” Adding to the frustration, the images often wouldn’t look as crisp as the original once they were rendered on the web.

Shoppers on the GUESS website experienced the frustration too. With GUESS ecommerce sites available to 55 countries and an estimated 76 percent of customers shopping using their smartphones, slow-loading speeds and broken links were clearly impacting conversions—not to mention creating a data drain for those users. “Optimizing images is important when people don’t have unlimited data,” Mattison added. “We didn’t want our customers to incur unnecessary data charges or go over their monthly limits.”

Assessing its site performance on WebPageTest.org, the GUESS development team saw firsthand how Cloudinary’s image optimization solution could significantly improve page performance. They officially made the switch and performed a global migration from Adobe Scene7 to Cloudinary.

Cloudinary automatically optimizes images for a better user experience

Built using flexible AWS solutions such as Amazon CloudFront, AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Snowball, and Amazon Rekognition, Cloudinary cured what was ailing GUESS developers. Through artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, Cloudinary enabled the GUESS team to skip the manual steps and challenging workarounds they were taking to get images on the website, streamlining the entire process.

Once images are shot in the GUESS photo studio or created in Photoshop, they’re uploaded in bulk using FTP directly to G-Image—a custom, homegrown solution that, using APIs, acts as a conduit to Cloudinary. File organization also became a breeze, which meant a better day-to-day workflow for the team.

Because Cloudinary automatically adjusts image URLs, GUESS was able to properly optimize visuals regardless of the browser or device a customer uses to see them. Now the images fit without the team having to do manual cropping and padding for each one. And, unsurprisingly, the result is great-looking photos. “The images look much crisper, like the originals,” said Mattison. “Having Cloudinary cut out these extra steps has been incredibly helpful.”

Since deploying Cloudinary, GUESS has seen improved performance on product detail pages (PDPs) through Cloudinary’s autoresponsive Product Gallery. This provided GUESS the flexibility it needed to deliver the same high-quality user experience regardless of device. “For the image to show up, with speed on mobile and look great, makes our users feel confident in their purchase and drives them to add to the bag,” Mattison shared. “With our new PDP viewer developed by Cloudinary, this is evident.”

40% decrease in page load times equals higher conversion rates

The Cloudinary support team and GUESS worked hand in hand to deliver dramatic results, fast. After deploying the Cloudinary solution, page load times decreased by 40 percent, which led to higher conversion rates on product detail pages (PDP). “It was exciting to have a new, modern platform like Cloudinary, which was much more advanced than what we were using,” Mattison added. “Cloudinary is always innovating with new functionalities and is at the forefront of modern technology. With a company the size of GUESS, that’s exactly what we needed.”

Speaking of sizes, one size doesn’t fit all in this scenario. Retailers do not have to be the size of GUESS to replace their internal, off-the-shelf visual tools and old, clunky processes.

No matter the size of your retail business, your customers expect fast, responsive websites and high-quality images to make the best purchase decisions. They’ll switch over to a competitor’s site if yours doesn’t deliver. Mattison and the developers at GUESS recognize how important this is. “Customer experience is a priority for us. We are nothing if we don’t have great visuals. And with Cloudinary, we are confident that our customers are always getting the best experience.”

To get started, request a demo from Cloudinary.

AWS Partner Spotlight

Cloudinary empowers the world’s top brands to deliver visual-first experiences that engage and convert. Cloudinary’s cloud-based solutions for image and video management and digital asset management harness AI-based technologies to remove traditional media management pain points and allow brands to focus on delivering optimal digital experiences faster.