How Suits Outlets Grew into a Million-dollar Business in just 7 Months with Smart Navigation

Suits Outlets is a global men's wear platform based in New York. Founded by designers from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Parsons, and GIA, the company aims to provide a one-stop shopping experience. Suits Outlets is passionate about promoting local designers and crafting special collections with talented young designers. The shop is a member of the NYC Fashion Association.

We've spoken to Suits Outlets' founder and owner, Daniel Liu, and here's what he had to say about his success story and Searchanise's significant role in it.

Daniel: "The idea came to me back in 2017, when I was working on a project in NYC's men's fashion industry. I've come to New York as an international student, to study fashion in New York. I realized the clothing here, especially the suits and tuxedos were crazy expensive. I was shocked by how hard it was to find a quality suit under $200 in New York.

"It's either big brands like Hugo Boss (if you want to buy a suit) and then you have the local stores that sell bad-quality suits for 300 bucks, which doesn't make sense at all.

"No-name suits, no brand, but they still start at 300 bucks. They might get from Chinese or Vietnamese factories ridiculously cheap. They sometimes even pretend to be selling brand suits when in fact they don't - they are just robbing people.

"I don't think that's the right way to do business, by just slapping a high-level price: so I moved everything online to sell at a reasonable price. Buying a suit shouldn't be that big an investment, every man deserves to have a couple without going broke."

Daniel: "There were two people: myself and the computer guy. I've expanded over the years though, now we have 8 people. We have a physical store in New York and we have a little warehouse in New Jersey. It's a 1-hour drive from here, so sometimes I go there, but most of the time I stay here in New York."

Daniel: "Different ones. There's one in California, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. We've started with suits only and now we've expanded to sell sportswear, shoes, shirts, hats… I want to make it a one-stop website, where people can buy everything they want for a party or a formal occasion. So when people buy for an event, they would stay on my website. I don't want them to buy a suit and then think they need to go elsewhere to buy a shirt or something else."

Daniel: "Since shopping for a suit online is different from buying a book, we had to carefully think about the user experience in order to make it smooth. Our biggest struggle was to get the website design right.

"There were a couple of points we to keep in mind. We wanted to make the website "flat", which means, the number of clicks before a customer finds something he wants is minimized. I don't want a customer to have to click 20 times before they see what they want. I want to try and keep it under 4 clicks.

"The other important thing is we don't want the customer to be overwhelmed with information. Nowadays websites are overloaded. Everyone wants to show everything to their customers, all at once. They fall into a trap when a customer has too many options to choose from and just closes the website. You need to have balance."

Daniel: With hundreds of suits and tuxedos on offer customers were having problems going through numerous options manually. We needed a search & filtering solution. Shopify provided only very basic functionality.

"We'd tried many plugins from their store, but none met our needs completely. We even thought of migrating to Magento - and then we tried out Searchanise's tool. In terms of functionality and also design, appearance, Searchanise was number 1, that's for sure.

"Your slick interface became immensely popular among customers and made it really easy to go through options by applying different filters, like brand, price, size, and many others.

"Customers say the website is really easy to navigate. I think that's because Searchanise's app, its search, is the backbone of the website. Basically, when someone refers to our website as user-friendly, they refer to Searchanise."

Daniel: "Massively. In 7 months since we've started using the app, we saw an increase of almost 70% in terms of conversion, compared to how we fared before! It's still growing at a steady pace. It's really good.

"We also use Searchanise's Upsell and Cross-Sell widgets, such as "Recently Viewed" and "You might also like". We found overall 16% of all orders have at least clicked one of these two. This is helping us increase the conversion too."

Daniel: "We use TrustPilot, an app for reviews very popular here in the US, as well as in Great Britain and Europe. We also use the tool called "Suit Finder": it helps the customer find what he's looking for.

"It's a step-by-step guided tour through the website. So the customer first sees a page where he can choose a regular or a slim fit suit, for example. On the next page, he selects a color. Then he gets to the search page.

"The idea is this: every page is connected to a Searchanise filter. The aim is to carefully guide the customer through the store. We don't want to him with information. It's especially useful on mobile devices where the screen space is limited.

"Filtering probably tops the list in terms of usefulness. Let's say a customer is looking for a black 3-piece suit in 42 Regular, preferably pinstriped. With Searchanise's filtering tools finding the suit and making a purchase is just several clicks away.

"Another amazing feature is the auto-indexation of the catalog every 10 minutes. No need for separate maintenance is awesome, considering we are constantly updating our clothing, footwear, and accessories range.

"We also love Searchanise's custom CSS option, which means we can fine-tune how the widgets look and blend them in with the rest of the site seamlessly."

Daniel: "Searchanise made it possible for us to quickly grow and develop, try out new things in the process. Our rise to a million-dollar company would not have been possible without it. It's the best on the market, trust me: we've checked out quite a few others."

Daniel: "Right now, under COVID circumstances, we're moving everything online. We are working on bringing more suit styles as well as more accessory options. The ultimate goal is to provide a one-stop shopping experience for our customers."