Grace Melbourne

Grace has been a Melbourne fashion institution since it opened its ivy-clad doors in 2007, and the boutique Ilana Moses built now curates a roster of around sixty designer labels, KHAITE, Chloé, Tibi and Proenza Schouler among them, across the Armadale flagship and a second store in Brighton.

The customer relationship is built on styling consultations and a tightly edited seasonal buy, and the brand describes itself as a fashion happy place, a register the online store had to carry too.

In 2021 the brand decided to rebuild its online store completely, a custom Shopify theme designed and built from scratch, and for a two-store, consultation-led boutique, the search architecture was scoped into the build brief from the outset.

The old store still had to trade while the new one was designed, so interim fixes ran on the outgoing theme in its final year, including forcing the canonical product URLs so the old architecture stopped splitting its own signals.

The keyword research was scoped inside the build project itself, so the commercial architecture, which collections the store would carry, was settled from search data before design began, and the navigation was worked through jointly on shared planning sheets as the build progressed.

The brand's own seasonal buy went into the work too, sales by designer and by category, so the pages given the most architectural weight were the ones the boutique sells through.

The store launched in September 2022 with the architecture already in place, a clean heading hierarchy, the designer and category structure, and a long-tail collection layer built for how Australian luxury buyers search.

Four years on it is still the live theme, trading through every season since without a replatform.

After launch the work moved to content, and the decision was to train it inwards from the start. The brand's marketing team learned to read the keyword research itself, plan content on the page, and connect each journal piece into the collection it supports.

Within a year the team was running the programme on its own steer, publishing into an architecture built to receive it, and we tapered by design, month by month, as the capability settled in-house.

The engagement ran as a three-way partnership between us, the design and build agency, and the brand's team, with the founder in the detail throughout and calls landing across three time zones, morning in the UK, evening in Melbourne.

The email programme runs in Klaviyo under our partner management alongside the search work, with the deliverability groundwork, the DMARC policy among it, done ahead of the mailbox providers' 2024 authentication enforcement. Search wins the customers, and Klaviyo keeps the styling-consultation relationship going once they've bought.