🦒 Girav pulls the longest straw with guided selling

A T-shirt is just a T-shirt - and thus one of the easiest things to buy online. At Girav, however, they know otherwise. In their beautiful office on Amsterdam's Keizersgracht, you'll soon discover that there's more to a "basic" item than meets the eye.

"I'll just show it right away," says shop manager Anna Maria Schulz as she opens Girav's website. "This is our basic T-shirt category. You can see right away that there is quite a lot of choice. But why do you have to have the 'Sydney' and not the 'Bangkok'? That's hard to tell from just the pictures. It's really overwhelming when you land on this page and have to choose a basic T-shirt."

A unique basic T-shirt for everyone

"It's a total of 28 basics," hooks E-commerce manager Sander van der Hoff. "We are really a T-shirt specialist, and precisely because we are specialists we have a lot of different types. Each shirt has a purpose or moment to wear it, for example under a shirt in summer or in winter. Or with one or two buttons open."

It shows: on a tour of the office, we see racks full of T-shirts of all shapes and sizes.

"We really have a T-shirt for every occasion," says Anna Maria. "There are so many tastes and so many differences, it's also just hard for a customer to judge all that."

That perception was confirmed during user testing. So the team set out to help customers choose.

The choice for Aiden

"I understood from a former colleague at fonQ that they were using Aiden's product finder software and that they liked it," Sander says. "But we had quite a long wish list of what the product finder had to meet, so we started researching that first."

"It was important to us that in the product finder it doesn't seem like you're still just tapping a few filters," Anna Maria explains. "You really need to be taken by the hand as a customer." The fact that the product finder could be made entirely in the company's own house style was also an important requirement.

Sander: "And we value insightful reporting on the use of product finder, without having to build separate links for that. These wishes we could really only check off with Aiden."

The effect of product finder on conversion

Within a week, the first product finder was live. Anna Maria: "The implementation was very easy. The link with Channable also allowed us to get started right away and it didn't take much IT to put it live on our website. Also Aiden itself, the backend, works very easily and pleasantly."

With so much wind blowing, it was briefly tense when the impact of the product finder was not felt right away. It turned out that the design of the call-to-action on the lister page got in the way. "Previously we had here," Anna Maria points out, "just a banner bar without a button." That turned out to lead to "banner blindness": customers simply looked over the product finder . "After an A/B test, we have now made it into a button 'Start product finder' and that is much more inviting to click."

With results. The conversion rate of choice users is as much as 25% higher compared to other visitors. Anna Maria: "We see that visitors actually purchase the recommended products."

And that's exactly what it's all about. Good, personal service is the heart of the organization, Sander explains. "We are focused on slow fashion. With us you buy high-quality basics with a very good fit." Thus, "premium" and "basic" do go hand-in-hand.

Meanwhile, a product finder for polo shirts has also been launched. For while Girav was originally known primarily for extra-long T-shirts, the company is now clearly looking beyond the length of their T-shirts.

The next step

In addition to conversion uptake, Anna Maria and Sander see other opportunities through the use of guided selling.

Anna Maria: "What is interesting, for example, is to see the differences between the Netherlands and Germany. In the Netherlands many more customers choose to wear it 'under a shirt' and in Germany 'just as a T-shirt'. With those insights we can actually do something."

The product finder also provides useful data at the individual customer level. For example, the link with Squeezely's customer data platform provides insight into which products a customer has been advised. "We are going to use that to make our marketing even more personal," says Anna Maria.

In addition, the webshop is working on a new blog format. Sander: "Think of content like 'What is the best way to style a T-shirt?' or 'What is the best way to wash a T-Shirt?' By also offering a product finder on these kinds of pages, we send people back to the webshop subconsciously." Another way of guided selling. "A smart one, if you ask us!"