Whether your brand's sales burn brightest in the summer months or not, there are so many ways to leverage the season’s spirit to shine a different – and sunny – light on your products that pull summer-loving shoppers to your site. Leaning into summer-focused activities, color palettes, trends, and holidays like July 4th, Pride, or Labor Day ensures online shoppers can indulge in those long-awaited summer vibes not only outdoors, but also on their screens – and specifically on your pages.
If you're a part of an ecommerce team behind building frontend experiences, you may be well-beyond "summer mode" as this time of year often marks the kickoff to winter holiday prep. But as you and your team start suiting up for colder weather and planning how your site will deliver holiday cheer, let's take a moment to soak in the sunshine and peruse some of the digital shopping experiences that are bringing this season to life (and sparking inspiration for the seasons ahead)...
Sur La Table:
They say we eat with our eyes first, but that visual inspiration certainly applies to the cooking process too, so Sur La Table ensures summer style shines into the heart of the home: the kitchen. Their homepage is a seasonal showcase that captures the flavors of summer as well as shoppers' attention. With product-highlighting recipes, guides, beautiful photography, carousels, banners, and animated visuals, the page format and element variation prevent mindless scrolling and incite summery cravings and culinary inspiration.
Sur La Table's immersive summer showcase brings all the flavors of the season to their gorgeous homepage.
UrbanStems:
We would be willing to argue that the charm of floral gifts spans the full 12-month, 4-season calendar, but for many, they’re closer to top-of-mind during the summer – especially since it’s also wedding season. UrbanStems has strategically leveraged this in the hero banner of their homepage – simplifying the customer journey by capturing the season's two common buyer intents and seamlessly directing them to pages with curated product options.
UrbanStems strategically leverages their products' synonymy with both the summer and wedding seasons in their homepage hero image.
Bramble Berry:
For the makers, DIYers, and those who feel there's something extra special about anything handmade, you ought to be familiar with Bramble Berry. They're always on top of leveraging seasonal and holiday scents for product releases and equally skilled at putting these collections on display. Their Bella Vita Collection, inspired by citrus fruits and drinks, rolling vineyards, and the Mediterranean seaside, is gorgeously laid out with stunning product photos bundled into carousels alongside scenic images, thematic fonts, and animations that capture shoppers' eyes.
Bramble Berry's Bella Vita collection page transports shoppers to the summery scenes that inspired their new scents.
Ethan Allen:
Homepage hero banner? Not atypical. A bespoke, dynamic display of products with shoppable hotspots? That’s what makes Ethan Allen’s home page a step above the rest. In their hero spot is a dynamic 3-scene loop (starting with “destination summer”) that beautifully displays different shop-the-room experiences – all with hotspots over key products that, when clicked, open custom quickviews to simplify the shopping journey – and shortening the path to purchase is always in season.
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Ethan Allen's interactive homepage hero image captures summer interior styles and perfects the art of shortening the path to purchase.
Natori:
Natori warmly welcomes shoppers with a homepage that's bold and captivating, but still clean and organized. They ditch generic formatting by varying the number of side-by-side elements, including both lifestyle photos and product images, and combining larger calls to action with more subtle headers. Natori also does an impeccable job at knowing how the season, their customers, and their products combine and building their home page accordingly with destination-specific elements, color-coordinated products, full outfit inspiration, and even enabling shoppers to browse products based on summer's favorite fabrics.
Natori's homepage proves they know their products, their customers, and how to work the season's influence on buying behaviors.
Although the brands, products, and summery digital shopping experiences above are all beautifully unique, there is one thing they have in common – they were all built using the same powerful ecommerce platform. Learn more about Fastr Frontend and how it equips ecommerce brands (like the ones above) with the unparalleled agility and flexibility to design, orchestrate, and deploy bespoke shopping experiences with speed, ease, and no dev handoffs.