Italian handbags from a shoe shop, taken online

An attempt to take sales from small shoe shops online with a new range of Italian handbags. The brand and the online store worked, but in the long run they ran into the difference between selling in a shop and selling online.

Starting point: shops, not an online store

The client ran small brick-and-mortar shoe shops. With a new range — imported Italian handbags — they wanted to take sales online as well.

A brand, starting from the name

The brand was created from scratch: the name Tascchi-Botti is an Italian-sounding rendering of the Czech “tašky-boty” (“bags-shoes”), pointing to the origin of the goods while saying what is on sale. The companion domain tasky-boty.cz catches those who type it the Czech way. The name was followed by a logo and later a visual style, which was partly unified across the online store and the shops.

The online store and running it

[binary] not only built the online store but also ran it for several years: order management, campaigns on search engines and price comparison sites, social media. In the medium term, the store did sell.

Why it didn’t work in the long run

A small shoe shop sells differently from the internet. In a shop, what counts is personal service, regular customers from the neighbourhood and goods people can try on. Online, the competition is on price, content, photography, delivery speed and ongoing marketing — and all of that needs dedicated capacity, not a side activity of a shop.

So the online store was not an internet version of the shop but a different business. That is where the project stalled in the long run — not on the technology or the brand.

Takeaways

Before building an online store, it needs to be clear who will run it day to day and how it will hold its own against online competition. Today [binary] raises these questions at the very start — before designing a solution.