The other day I talked about the use of educational content in e-mails versus the use of strict promotion/sale content. Customers may go to your site to find a specific product, but they are more often going to your site to fill a need or find a solution to a problem. Educational content is needed, especially on the web, to guide customers to the products that they seek based on the problems they are trying to solve.
With this in mind, I’m impressed by the simple homepage feature that Lands’ End has on their site. The concept is simple: customers are looking for outerwear and the site is guiding them to the type of outerwear they need based on the climate that they live in. It’s a real simple concept that works well, from the user perspective:
I think apparel retailers often over look the types of problems that they are actually solving with their clothing. Focusing on fashion, trends and styles is very important but don’t overlook the utility of what you sell.