Syndicode

Le New Black

Le New Black

Global brands and retailers in one platform
Industry
Fashion
Location
France, Paris
Timeline
Start 2022
  • Fashion
  • /
  • France
  • /
  • Start 2022
Services

Mobile development, Technical support

Technologies

Objective-C, C++

Team

Senior iOS Developer

Le New Black is a B2B platform that connects global brands and retailers. Syndicode has been enhancing its iPad application with new features and providing on-demand technical support.

Since we began working on the project, the Le New Black application received, among all, a text recognition module, full-text live search, and a YouTube video automatic playback feature. Thanks to Syndicode, the app has improved its performance tremendously and stopped experiencing crash issues.

About the project
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Le New Black iPad app is a wholesale trade management platform for fashion brands and retailers. It goes alongside the main website, which is a showroom and an ERP.

The app aims to simplify sales and order management. Brands can present their collections, take orders, and add retailers to the platform. The app helps track their sales performance with a built-in analytics tool. It automatically synchronizes with the brand’s account providing real-time information on items.

Retailers benefit from the app due to its convenient search and order placement features and powerful tracking system. The application can also work offline.

 

The client turned to Syndicode for the development of new features and stable on-demand support for the existing application. They wanted to delegate the technical issues and fully focus on the business side of the project.

Challenges
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Inconvenient search

The Le New Black platform houses over 300 brands, each having hundreds of items in stock. Searching across this volume of data used to take a long time, especially with filters applied. This frustrated customers and interfered with inviting new clients into the platform.

Solution

Syndicode engineers implemented a real-time asynchronous client-side search engine using C++. With it, the app can conduct a full-text search through thousands of products. Then we further boosted the system’s performance with a lock-free live search algorithm. Now a user gets their search result in the blink of an eye and can review all the items somehow related to their search query.

Complicated order placement

If a user wanted to shop in different categories, they had to search for them separately. Then they should visit individual product pages and select the sizes and colors. This was time-consuming and impacted the user experience. At the same time, standard iOS controls didn’t allow creating a complex order form.

Solution

We made a custom control for creating an order table. It works similarly to the default UICollectionView element but can manage large amounts of data without harming the app’s performance. Now, the user can review all the items in the specified category or a brand, filter them, and select the number of products of a certain type, color, size, etc. All the information is displayed in a single table, and the user can complete their purchase in a minimum of steps. This way, we made the most out of the iPad’s screen space and improved UX tremendously.

Features

Business card scanner

We built a custom module that uses Google Cloud Natural Language AI and OpenCV library to scan text and extract certain data.

Instead of manually adding retailers to the platforms, app users can scan business cards with their devices. Our module enables the app to read the card owner’s name, their company name, address, and contact information.

Third-party video playback

Le New Black app users can embed videos from the top popular sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion.

YouTube is very popular among Le New Black users but it prohibits direct video integration at the code level. The Syndicode engineers came up with a creative way to get around this issue and made a player that starts/pauses video automatically and matches the app’s aesthetics.

Full-text search

Thanks to our solution, the user can review all the items that are somehow associated with the phrase they typed in the search field.

A smart algorithm prioritizes items based on their relevance to the search query. This way, a user doesn’t have to remember the searched item’s exact name or ID. They can also search for products from a certain vendor or of a specific type, style, etc.

Services delivered

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TECHNICAL SUPPORT
Syndicode provides an on-demand tech support service to Le New Black. At the beginning of the project, our engineers analyzed the application and resolved the identified UX and performance issues.

Since we started introducing new features, we’ve been performing thorough testing to ensure they integrate smoothly into the existing app structure and work as intended. Apart from that, we do scheduled checkups to see that the application works in line with the newest Apple updates.

Mobile development
Syndicode continues providing full-cycle services from development to version management and uploading to App Store Connect.

Our engineer started work on the project from the app audit and fixed the identified bugs and code inconsistencies. As a result, the application became more stable Our engineer started work on the project from the app audit and fixed the identified bugs and code inconsistencies. As a result, the application became more stable.

As of this writing, we developed a new UX-centered approach to app navigation. We also simplified the process of product search and order for the user by increasing the information density on a screen and eliminating the multi-step routine. The Syndicode engineer rewrote the search feature to make its code lightweight and help it execute faster. Additionally, we carried out a new way of order composing based on catalogs, added more information to the product page, including the video embedding feature, and implemented a business card scanner.

How it works

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1 /
Register
Brands can start using the application after they were manually registered at the Le New Black website by the platform’s support and subscribed to the service. Retailers get to the platform using their vendor’s invitation.
2 /
Choose your brand
Upon login, the app offers the user to select a brand to review. The next screen features an option to create a new order and review unprocessed and completed orders, buyers added by that brand, and collections.
3 /
Create an order
To create an order, you need to have a buyer’s profile set. Alternatively, you can create a new buyer manually or scan their business card. Now, you can proceed to selecting a collection and reviewing items. Users can apply their previously created templates to compose orders, search for items in a catalog using text queries and filters, or use the in-app barcode scanner. You can review individual items, select sizes, patterns, colors, or other available characteristics, and save them to the cart. You can also change the default tile view to a table view. The table view, in its turn, comes in a short and a long form. In the short table variant, the user can shop for the selected item in different colors and styles. The long table additionally features all the possible sizes for that item.
4 /
Contact your team
After you finish picking items, you can review your order and make edits to the items’ quantity or delete them. Before sending off an order, you can write an email to the retailer and send copies to your staff if you are a vendor. There also is a box for internal notes that won’t be visible to the retailer. You can switch to another brand or collection or exit to the main menu from anywhere in the app. If you are a vendor, you also can organize your collections by creating folders and adding styles.
Result
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“ Thanks to Syndicode, the application is now more robust and reliable. The response time is faster, and we are satisfied with their high-quality code…”

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