The Cutting Edge of Digital Luxury

Even as ecommerce grows ever more powerful and immersive, recreating the intimacy and personalized service of a local in-store experience online can remain a challenge—especially for luxury brands whose clientele expect carefully curated recommendations and customer-centric service that builds loyalty and trust.

Founded by Canadian identical twin brothers Dean and Dan Caten, Dsquared2 is a luxury fashion house based in Milan whose edgy mashup style is beloved by celebrities and young people around the world. Eager to exercise complete ownership over its online storefront and operations, the brand wanted to move away from a Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform that it shared with other customers and selected Astound as the ideal partner to launch its new storefront.

Dsquared2 wasn’t just looking to migrate to its own exclusive Commerce Cloud platform—the brand also wanted to create a seamless and engaging digital experience for customers across international markets, one that mimicked the highly localized experience of shopping in-store as closely as possible. In addition, Dsquared2 needed to improve its storefront’s web performance, especially site speed, and to introduce a new streamlined checkout and fulfillment solution in collaboration with trusted third-party partner ESW. The project also carried an ambitious timeline of just 16 weeks from discovery to launch.

We leveraged our proprietary accelerator, Launch360: Storefront to reduce cost and speed time to market for Dsquared2, upgrading the brand’s legacy Commerce Cloud implementation to a fast, modern reference architecture. To meet Dsquared2’s ambitious deadlines, we also conducted discovery in parallel with the development process and began system integration testing early in the development phase. We conducted the entire development phase in sprints, which allowed us to quickly and flexibly deliver high-quality work while prioritizing key functionalities based on DSquared2’s specific goals. With time-to-launch being the highest priority, we also opted for a streamlined design phase, enabling a rapid implementation while maximizing brand impact.

Utilizing the Astound Commerce Launch360 Accelerator, Dsquared2 has gone live in under 4 months. With time to launch being the highest priority, we opted for a streamlined design phase, enabling a rapid implementation whilst maximizing brand impact.
This marks phase 1 in our ongoing partnership with Dsquared2.

To support Dsquared2’s vision for a localized experience for customers around the globe, new storefront features EWI, Google Analytics, CommandersAct, LiveChat, and Google Store Locator, among other best-in-class functionalities.

Where possible, we used the highest grade Launch360 tooling to create a plan for Dsquared2-specific storefront and applied similar lightweight methods to our design process to facilitate a smooth transition from Launch360 out-of-the-box to a unique product that matched Dsquared2’s needs. We also applied Launch360’s extensive built-in functionalities as the foundation for the brand’s powerful new online storefront. In addition, we employed our new accelerated Agile approach to collaborate seamlessly with ESW to integrate a new checkout and fulfillment solution.

On April 19, 2023, we launched Dsquared2’s powerful new online storefront on time and on budget, completing the first phase of our ongoing work with the luxury fashion brand. Highlights include:

• The project was completed in less than five months from discovery to go-live
• We fixed almost all bugs pre-launch while meeting Dsquared2’s ambitious deadlines
• The new site is blazingly fast, with page load times 2.5 seconds faster than on Dsquared2’s previous storefront