Nour Hammour designs sophisticated outerwear that blends timeless and modern aesthetics. Launched in 2013 with an iconic leather jacket, the label draws inspiration from the evolving aesthetic of women’s lives to create timeless, artisanal designs.
“Being a luxury brand, our main goal was deeply rooted in profoundly understanding and mirroring our clientele's preferences and behaviors in the luxury world,” says Zeina El Zein, Communications and Ecommerce Director at Nour Hammour.
But the label's ecommerce journey wasn’t simple. After switching between different ecommerce platforms a few times, Nour Hammour decided to stick with Shopify for good.
Since reimagining its online store with Shopify, Nour Hammour has seen:
- 63% year-over-year increase in conversion rate
- 128% year-over-year increase in sales
Challenge: Bringing an immersive retail experience online
With roots in made-to-measure, Nour Hammour understands women’s needs. Customers have routinely visited the Paris showroom to touch and feel jackets, meet the team, and immerse themselves in the world of Nour Hammour. With its new website, the brand wanted to find a way to translate these in-person interactions to the digital space.
“Luxury is an emotional experience, and our customers are experienced buyers,” says Zeina. The marketing team needed a way to tell stories in an elevated, Nour Hammour way, while providing product guidance, craftsmanship details, and sustainability information.
In parallel, the new online store needed to be fast, functional, and optimized for both desktop and mobile. It also needed strong support for videos, which enabled product discovery through movement.
Yet, Nour Hammour’s existing website felt slow despite high image compression and few videos. The mobile experience was also secondary to that of the desktop. With over 90% of customers shopping online using their phones, the team knew it needed to put a greater emphasis on the journey of its mobile shoppers.
To overcome these challenges, the Nour Hammour team began searching for Shopify experts with experience developing custom builds for fashion and luxury brands. That’s when it found Commerce-UI, a design and technology-focused ecommerce partner for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.
Solution: Building a new online store with Hydrogen
Commerce-UI decided a headless architectural approach, which involves separating the front end and back end of a website, would be optimal for making Nour Hammour’s new online store more performant and customizable. Going headless would also create opportunities for using advanced tools like Sanity CMS and MUX Video.
After a careful evaluation, the team decided to use Hydrogen—Shopify’s headless commerce toolkit—which mitigated any concerns about extra complexity, costs, or development overhead that are sometimes associated with headless solutions. This decision proved to be the right move to meet Nour Hammour’s needs.
“What we love about Hydrogen is that it’s purpose-built for Shopify storefront development. We could use pre-built components like cart, pagination, and search, as well as ready-to-use code for products, collections data fetching, or automatic SEO schemas generation. Choosing Hydrogen literally saved us months of custom development,” says Tom Mittlener, senior developer at Commerce-UI.
Deploying its Hydrogen build on Oxygen—Shopify’s globally-distributed hosting solution for Hydrogen storefronts—made the transition to Hydrogen even smoother. Hydrogen also proved to be flexible enough to elevate the new website’s visual appearance.
The label partnered with Ania and Lucie, a creative agency based in New York City with a Franco-American modern aesthetic that resonated with the Nour Hammour brand. This collaboration allowed Nour Hammour to create a digital flagship that offered an elevated shopping experience for women, blending its Parisian luxury showroom experience with the curated style of its Instagram page.
"We wanted our clients to immerse themselves into our world through beautiful storytelling," says Zeina. "Each page has a subtle surprise that adds a spark to your shopping journey."
One of the standouts is the new editorial lookbook page that allows clients to scroll through campaign images as though they are reading a fashion editorial story and shop on the spot through the “add to bag” button—all without leaving the lookbook context.
Storytelling got an upgrade on Nour Hammour’s new website as well. The team began to seamlessly blend its content with commerce thanks to product data synchronization between Shopify and Sanity CMS. For example, it put flexible modules in place such as a Guides page to help customers find the perfect jacket, similar to how the team advises women in its Parisian boutique.
Sanity also simplified the marketing team’s work with features including built-in image cropping, focal points, real-time collaboration, content scheduling, translations, and synced product data from Shopify, all of which the team began taking advantage of right away.
“The new setup has made it even easier for us to own the experience," said Justine Leroulley, Art Director at Nour Hammour.
Finally, Commerce-UI helped Nour Hammour streamline its complicated workflow for manually compressing and exporting videos. With the addition of MUX video, the team can now just drag and drop uncompressed, high-resolution video files into the CMS, and the rest happens automatically. The Nour Hammour team can be confident that its videos are properly cropped, resized, and compressed, something of particular importance to mobile users.
Results: Elevated brand experience goes live in time for Fashion Week
With the launch of its meticulously designed online flagship, Nour Hammour has laid the foundation for an ever-improving digital presence centered around meaningful customer relationships. Its new online store was released just in time for the busy Paris Fashion Week. The new website is fast, and the customer experience feels immersive. Only a month after the release the brand saw impressive results with its year-over-year conversion rate up 63% and corresponding sales up 128%.
Modern tools like Sanity CMS or MUX have given Nour Hammour’s marketing team the freedom to tell meaningful stories and provide guidance to their customers online, without relying on developers' availability.
Whether in-person or online, Nour Hammour prides itself on forging genuine connections through thoughtful, individualized service. This bespoke approach remains the company's north star, and will continue to play in hand in all future enhancements of their digital touchpoints.
“Having this very one-on-one experience is a core tenant of the brand,” says Celine El Khoury, Sales Director at Nour Hammour. “Online or offline, it's always important for us that we have this intimate conversation with our client, that's our sweet spot for the brand.”
Shopify Plus is easy to use and highly customizable, which has helped us deliver an immersive retail experience to our customers online. Its in-depth reporting capabilities also ensure our entire team is aware of our sales and other critical metrics such as client engagement. We use these insights to form deeper connections with our customers and to celebrate our wins together as a team.
