A digital boutique experience

Since 1890, when Santi Dell’Oglio founded his first boutique in Palermo, the name has been synonymous with style and elegance. 130 years on and the family is still at the forefront of Sicily’s fashion scene with 3 boutiques, its own menswear collection and a selection of the world’s best brands for both men and women.

According to Mario Dell’Oglio, who now leads the family business, “elegance is always about understatement”. So, we took this idea and built a digital shopping experience around it. The new online store had to be sleek and cutting-edge while communicating the family heritage of the company, and its love story with Palermo – all with a personalized, boutique touch.

We started with colour. We chose the classic yet decisive combination of black and white as the primary colour palette. Afterwards, we added a range of sophisticated mid tones including pale grey and beige to add warmth and depth.

The choice of font was key to linking the heritage of the boutique with the present. For the titles and menu we selected a condensed serif typeface similar to those used in the 1890s. We combined this with a light and airy san serif which the paragraphs and products information easy to read. Finally, we incorporated a scripted font into some titles that give the idea of Mario Dell’Oglio personally giving you style tips – for a true boutique experience.

We used the Shopify platform to power the e-commerce part of the site to guarantee speed, reliability and constant security updates. We tailor-made the user experience onto this base, personalizing it to meet the needs of Dell’Oglio and its clientele.

The modular structure means that the store manager can add and remove sections when necessary and the full width layout leaves space for the product and lifestyle imagery.

We also added a strong editorial element across the whole site. This is most obvious in the shoppable editorials of the Stories and In focus sections but we also included editorial modules in the product landing pages. This magazine-style content encourages users to stay, browse, and examine the garments before they buy. All of this makes shopping online at Dell’Oglio a real past-time, a true digital-boutique experience.