A Cup of Coffee with... Carmina Shoemaker increases sales by 23%!

An in-depth interview with Margalida Rius (Industrial Design Engineer & Product Designer at Carmina Shoemaker) and Miquel Martorell (eCommerce & Marketing Manager at Carmina Shoemaker) 

Text: Judit Simón // Photos: Carmina Shoemaker

Carmina Shoemaker, known for their hand-crafted shoes, was founded in 1997 in Inca, Mallorca. In 2012, they decided to bet on e-commerce to boost the customer shopping experience and enhance the omnichannel strategy.  

In 2015, they launched their first online store together with Trilogi, the e-commerce Consultancy Firm. Since then, they have trusted the Headless e-commerce Platform LogiCommerce, and together, they have constantly been developing new solutions. 

Commitment and continuous effort have been key factors in carrying out one of their latest major projects, the 3D Personalizer, designed to create a truly immersive shopping experience.

How would you explain the shopping experience that you are offering your customers?  

“We have always tried to offer the best experience to our customers through great UX, support through the chat, and also through our Customizable Models. However, we felt like something was missing and that we had to do justice to the great quality of our hand-crafted shoes. 

The 2D Customizer that we had in our e-commerce became obsolete. We wanted to expand the functionalities and possibilities of the different models and provide a much more realistic visualization of the shoes by creating immersive 3D experiences where the customer could customize the shoe with a higher level of precision and detail. 

In order to enhance the shopping experience, we integrated a visually powerful 3D Customizer to display the quality of the shoe across the screen, offering maximum accuracy in every detail and providing the customer with great flexibility during the entire customization process.  

To achieve our desired results, we trusted Trilogi to manage and carry out the project, LogiCommerce, the e-commerce software that integrated the 3D Customizer, and Threedium, the tool that created the fully interactive online 3D models to create immersive shopping experiences.” 

What was the main challenge of the project?   

“The main challenge was to program and coordinate a large number of options and variations within each model. We had to consider all the existing options (leather, toe cap, tongue, etc.) to correctly create the different customization possibilities and coordinate all this information to generate the shoe in 3D.

The immense magnitude of details that can be configured with the 3D Customizer is truly amazing. Some models have thousands of possible options, which, combined among them, result in billions of variations. In addition, each option has its own specific programming, so it was necessary to correctly program which materials could be used in each piece in order to correctly show the customer all the real possibilities.  

Users can share the URLs of their designs and even save them to continue designing or buying them later. To maintain the same quality on all devices, we decided to duplicate all models, one for mobile and another for desktop, because of its weight and loading time.”

Have you noticed an increase in your online sales since the implementation of the Customizer? 

“Since the implementation of the new 3D Customizer, our sales have gone up by 23%, and the conversion rate of custom shoes has doubled, representing 25% of our total sales. We have customers from all over the world, many of them with several pairs of Carmina shoes, and over the last year, we could see that the 3D Customizer has mostly been used by our customers in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.”

From your point of view, are you satisfied with the result? Is it what you were expecting?

“We are very proud of the result, which exceeded our expectations. Although it was a very complex project, we successfully implemented a unique 3D Customizer that stands out from any other customizer that we have seen so far.

The level of detail and options that customers can choose from is exactly what we were hoping to accomplish, and we are very grateful for the support of experts like Trilogi and LogiCommerce throughout this project. 

Moreover, we created an omnichannel experience by incorporating the Customizer in our physical stores using various screens, enabling our customers to create their own pair of customized Carmina shoes through the e-commerce site, with the added value of having the support of the sales assistants and the opportunity of touching various types of leather to strengthen the purchase decision. This way, 25% of the total custom orders were made in our physical stores.”

Looking at the future, what is coming next for you?

“We will definitely continue working together with LogiCommerce, Trilogi and Threedium to implement future solutions. One of the next projects we have planned for the near future is to be able to project the models in Augmented Reality to enrich the customer’s experience even more. That way, customers can customize their shoes and try them on to see how they would look on them. This can be a real game changer, and we are excited to see those future developments.”