How SikSilk leverages UGC to bring relevance and authenticity to its online store, increasing engagement and sales

About SikSilk

SikSilk is a British-born, athletically-styled global fashion brand, drawing inspiration from top athletes across the world. Building a style that fuses sportswear meets streetwear, they have become one of the biggest names in the urban clothing scene.

Since its humble beginnings as a business started by three Scarborough-based school-friends in the UK, the company has grown into a global brand with online stores in the UK, US, Australia, Spain and beyond.

One of SikSilk’s founding missions was to create a movement of youth culture, with consumers who are out being creative and making a statement in what they wear. Integral to that vision and identity is their work with influencers and the user-generated content (UGC) they create.

“SikSilk started in 2012 and quite quickly the brand was picked up by celebrities and sports stars. From there, it really snowballed, leading to collaborations with Lionel Messi and Dani Alves,” says Ecommerce Manager, Chris Longshaw.

“SikSilk really focuses on pushing products through our influencer network. I think that’s important for consumers because they’re getting a different viewpoint of a product. They’re getting to see it in real life, rather than just within the model shoots.”

Challenge

Like many retailers, SikSilk faced the challenge of creating a more engaging experience for their shoppers, keeping them sticky to their site, and turning them into repeat purchasers and brand advocates.

In response to the power of their influencer network, SikSilk became increasingly interested in the UGC their brand fans and influencers were creating and sharing on social—and how it could be used to keep customers engaged and increase their purchase propensity.

“We are concentrating on getting new customers into the site as well as holding onto loyal customers through this UGC,” says Chris.

Eager to harness the potential of UGC to help them increase engagement, conversion rates, and repeat purchases, SikSilk turned to Visual UGC from Nosto’s Commerce Experience Platform.

Solution

“We weren’t using anything in terms of UGC content curation before turning to Visual UGC. There was no join between our Instagram account(s) and our Shopify Plus store within a front-end display of products. Nosto’s Visual UGC bridges that gap and links our social and selling strategies,” Chris says.

By deploying content sourced from Instagram via UGC widgets through Nosto’s Visual UGC solution, SikSilk created a seamless brand experience—showing their products ‘as worn by’ their brand fans and influencers—shortening the path to purchase, especially for new customers.

“Visual UGC and shoppable content really allow us to inject the valuable UGC into our brand and customer experiences by displaying it on our online store via the homepage and PDP pages,” Chris says.

Using Visual UGC, the brand was not only able to quickly explore, source and curate content for their site, but also gain rights approval, saving valuable time and effort. Before long, widgets were rolled out across both the homepage and product pages of their Spanish site, areas which the brand considers to be significant touchpoints.

“When we think of standard PDP pages, they can be bog-standard listing pages of just product, product, product. Visual UGC and shoppable content just add something within there that’s capturing a bit more of people’s attention and engaging them in a more authentic and relevant way. And as a result of that UGC, they should be spending more time on the site and be more likely to buy.”

Results

Within a short space of time, SikSilk were able to see the benefits that Visual UGC and shoppable content brought to their business.

“Visual UGC is a powerful bit of kit, especially for brands who hold influencer marketing as a key part of their strategy. We’ve seen some really good conversions from the engagement this content fuels. And it only took a few weeks before we started to see sales attributed to these UGC widgets.”

Nosto’s Visual UGC solution serves as a critical part of SikSilk’s ecommerce technology stack allowing them to offer a more authentic and relevant experience on site. And above all else, the tool has helped the company hit crucial KPIs and business goals.

“The tool helps us increase engagement, drive sales, and improve conversion rates. We’ve seen that in the early results from the widgets we’ve deployed already. It has given our customers a much more engaging experience on site which was a key priority for us: to encourage people to shop and stay on the site for longer. Using Visual UGC to curate UGC and deploy it in various places is definitely going to save us time and money on campaign creation—something I expect, over time, will only increase.”

As such, SikSilk is looking to make Visual UGC an even larger part of their overall strategy and will be rolling the module out across multiple online store locales. Having seen the merit of Visual UGC and shoppable content, and as the feature is supported by Nosto’s A/B testing tool, one of the company’s next steps will be to use the two in tandem to continually optimize their approach to UGC.

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