About Betabrand
Betabrand is an online women’s apparel company known for Dress Pant Yoga Pants and other activewear for everything from work to travel. The brand’s customers participate in the design process by voting on new clothing concepts and providing their feedback, helping the company bring the best new products to market based on their consumers’ recommendations. There are live shows put on weekly where products are launched and designers field questions about new items. This experience is interactive through adding chat to their livestreams.
Challenge
Betabrand wanted to add common social network features to its already socially interactive platform. The company’s aim was to be the Facebook of fashion by driving discussion through the use of social feeds. Betabrand did not want to reinvent the wheel if they didn’t have to, so they started looking for solutions for feed development outside of their organization so that they could focus on the core competencies of their brand. Additionally, one of Betabrand’s major differentiating factors is that their online experience is interactive; therefore, the integration of live chat was crucial for their model. Stream could provide activity feeds for their designs and notifications, along with a real-time chat product.
Why Stream
Betabrand was on-board when they heard that Stream was introducing chat messaging to their product offerings, as they had already been using Stream’s feeds product to showcase their clothing designs. Since they were interested in keeping both chat and feeds on the same platform, using Stream for both features was a no-brainer. Additionally, Betabrand uses the Javascript SDK for feeds, and since they could use the same SDK with chat, that was another bonus. Betabrand built an MVP in an impressive turnaround time leveraging Stream’s functionality which led to fine-tuning the product and chat going live on their site in less than a week. Stream Chat and Feeds are the solutions that allow Betabrand to figure out what designs their customers want to see in an efficient, clean, and clear way. Betabrand needed a fast and efficient solution to speed up the feed and chat development process without heavy investment, and Stream was their number one candidate after sifting through their available options.
Jared Rapp, Director of Engineering at Betabrand, says, “The work to integrate Chat happened really quickly - the turnaround time was less than a week. It was a painless process.”
Primary Reasons that Betabrand integrated Stream:
- Quick time to market
- Did not want to take the time and resources to develop in-house
- High performance
Another important element that caused Betabrand to choose Stream was because of their online resources, including detailed tutorials, demonstrating how to integrate Stream’s products.
“We are very, very happy with how fast it was to get a full-featured chat in place on our site through Stream. We have never seen that kind of turnaround time before. Stream saved us time and effort and helped us start making a lot of forward movement on our process.” - Jared Rapp, Director of Engineering at Betabrand
Future Vision
If a consumer is looking for a spot to get clothing items on the market based on their direct feedback and recommendations, Betabrand is the place to go. This brand has changed the way that people shop, as users can chat with someone in real-time on the Betabrand site to work with them on customized apparel designs. Betabrand strives to continue to change the shopping experience for more and more people as this online platform grows.