By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing

Last week, Demandware hosted an evening of cocktails for NYC ecommerce executives at the Barneys New York Penthouse. High above the hustle and bustle of Madison Avenue, above floors and floors of handbags, shoes, and must-have designers gathered ecommerce executives from the greater NY area. Everyone gathered for some industry chatter, delicious appetizers, thirst quenching cocktails, and of course story time by the one, the only...Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York.

We promised Simon we would not reveal too much of what he shared, but let's just say that we learned what Simon "the First Elf" Doonan was up to all year in helping the Obamas celebrate their first Christmas at the White House. Unfortunately if you missed the event, you will have to wait until Simon's coffee table book about his adventure arrives sometime in the distant future.

Thank you again to all those who attended. It was a night full of great company, stories, and ideas!

Special thank you to Simon, Larry, Jordan, Heather, and the rest of the team at Barneys for helping us with yet another amazing event!

By Zachary E. Cook, Demandware Interactive Marketing

We are pleased to welcome the sixth member of the Jones Apparel Group family of brands to launch on the Demandware eCommerce Platform-Rachel Roy. In addition to giving shoppers access to the full range of the brand's collections, www.rachelroy.com utilizes a variety of visual and interactive tools to create a highly engaging social shopping experience. Here is a taste of some of the innovative features you'll find on their site:

Online Shopping Goes Social
Not only can you share your thoughts about all of Rachel's styles with all your friends on 175 different social networks, but you can also view her most recent Tweets and Facebook updates. Now you can shop online with your friends-wherever they are.

Everything Rachel
From documentaries, to Oprah, to store openings and trips to Africa, the Everything Rachel section offers a 360 degree view of the designer, her clothes and what goes on behind the scenes.

Grab a Hot New Look
Take the guess work out of putting together a great outfit with the help of the Rachel Rachel Roy Lookbook. From clothes to shoes and accessories, the lookbook offers a few suggestions straight from the designer for you to look your best.

Congratulations to Rachel Roy and Jones Apparel Group for launching another highly stylized, innovative site.

By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

While putting the finishing touches on the new client section of our website, I couldn’t help but notice just how many great apparel sites are running on the Demandware eCommerce Platform. So this got me thinking about exactly what it is in our platform that makes it so appealing for apparel brands. One of the reasons that stuck out to me was that apparel brands have a set of requirements that are often difficult to reconcile in a single solution—merchandising, customization and innovation—all of which are major pieces of our platform:

• Merchandising: Whether online or in stores, merchandising is essential for apparel brands and they simply cannot and will not settle for second best. Marketers and merchandisers need to be able to control all aspects of these sites—from product and catalog data to promotions and price books to content and searchandising—at anytime, from anywhere and with Demandware’s web-based user interface they can.


• Customization: Apparel brands need the ability to express the uniqueness of their brand and a cookie-cutter solution just won’t do. From simple changes to content to more complex changes to the underlying code and architecture, Demandware’s integrated development environment (IDE) allows full customization—not just retheming a few templates.


• Innovation: With the rapid pace in which ecommerce is evolving, apparel brands need to stay on the cutting edge more than ever before. But with many in-house applications, staying on the forefront of innovation can be difficult (aka expensive and slow). Today’s apparel brands need a constant stream of new features, new functionality and performance enhancements. And they need all this delivered regularly, automatically and at no cost to them as Demandware does with our seasonal upgrades.

There are certainly some things that Demandware does not do (yes, we’re self aware) but merchandising, customization and innovation? Well, our customers are telling us we check those boxes quite emphatically.

By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

Congratulations to Crocs on the re-launch of its US site on the Demandware eCommerce Platform, www.crocs.com - the first of many to be rolled out over the coming months. The new site looks amazing and is loaded with new features that improve the online experience for the millions of Crocs fans out there. A few noteworthy new features:

• Search: by size, style, color and price
• Multiple Product Views: top, front, side, back and zoom
• Enhanced Shopping Cart Functionality: including the addition of a mini-cart
• Email a Friend and Wish List: for dropping those not-so-subtle hints!

We're very excited to share this news and hope you'll check out the new site. And if you're looking for a new pair of Crocs, you can take advantage of Free Shipping during the month of July.

We look forward to new Crocs sites popping up across the globe very shortly!