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Orlebar Brown
Sunkissed and carefree, a man places a set of headphones over his ears. The sound of gentle waves lapping the beach and the faint cry of seagulls give way to melodic beats as he casually strides across the sand in a pair of bold printed shorts before relaxing on a stack of sun loungers.
The short film that tops menswear brand Orlebar Brown’s website homepage is cinematic – and effective. Instantly, you are transported.
At the foot of the page, the image of a branded lifeguard beach hut is underscored by the text “Feel Summer” emblazoned in bold, red capital letters.
The homepage feels uncluttered, bright and relaxed. Underneath the video header, a carousel showcases the brand’s new collection, which includes the same shorts the model is seen wearing in the video, priced at £295.
Sun-drenched campaign shots featuring models emerging from the sea, in beach or poolside resort locales, serve as large clickable tiles that transport the customer through to collections of swim shorts, shirts, trousers and polo shirts – summer wardrobe staples and everything one might need for a visit to somewhere sunny like St Tropez.
The slogan “Every O.B product is developed with a holiday in mind” sits alongside a mission statement that concludes: “The moment an O.B drawstring bag goes into a suitcase the holiday has begun.”
Orlebar Brown, which was bought by the owners of French luxury brand Chanel in 2018, is a brand that knows how to connect with its customer. It is not just selling products – it is selling a lifestyle.
As part of Drapers’ Wonderful Websites series, which goes behind the scenes with brands and retailers that are leading the way in ecommerce, Orlebar Brown offers a compelling lesson in the art of what’s possible: creating a website that inspires customers, and then converts them. (Other profiles in the series: Astrid & Miyu, Finisterre and Victoria Beckham)
For the brand, whose collections have expanded beyond the signature tailored swim shorts that first made its name when launched by founder Adam Brown in 2007, the challenge has been translating that feeling online without distracting from its customer’s core mission – filling his suitcase for trips to sunny destinations.
Most retailers build brands around personas. Orlebar Brown has gone one step further.
“We have our muse, internally. His name is Sunny,” says Trevor Hardy, chief marketing officer at Orlebar Brown. “It’s the person we design all our product for. It’s the person we design all our comms and marketing around.”
For Kavita Kumar, the brand’s head of ecommerce, Sunny provides a useful lens through which to evaluate every digital decision. “We know he’s in a holiday state of mind, he’s optimistic and seeking the sun,” she explains. “We’re looking to create that online experience for this person.”
Today, Orlebar Brown has evolved into a global luxury lifestyle brand with nearly 60 stores scattered across an array of glamorous destinations. The collection has broadened, its tone became more refined, and its digital flagship needed to mature with it.
“It started as swim shorts and there was a naivety and beach-and-pool immaturity to the brand 20 years ago,” says Hardy. “As the brand has grown up, we’ve become more ready-to-wear, more mature and more rounded in our collections. That maturity was part of the brief, for the web experience to come more in line with the grown-up offering of the brand.”
Orlebar Brown
Hardy adds that the task was also to modernise the website’s functionality and aesthetic to ready the brand for its next phase of growth online, without losing that sunny sense of optimism that defines Orlebar Brown.
“It has a beautiful, distinctive luxury product. The question isn’t ‘how do we optimise, optimise, optimise’. It’s about how to present these beautifully thought-through products on the front-end,” says Ben Homer, solutions engineering lead at commerce platform Shopify, which started working with the brand in 2024.
Luxury ecommerce experiences involve a tough balancing act. They have to deliver the speed, simplicity and friction-free shopping online consumers expect, but also create a sense of theatre and aspiration. The two must blend seamlessly to create the elevated digital experience a luxury customer expects. (See a preview of Orlebar Brown’s tech stack in the box below).
“One thing I think is true especially for any brand in the premium or luxury space is that tussle between being efficient and frictionless but also having a little bit of joy,” says Hardy. “Especially for a brand like Orlebar Brown, which is about summer and holidays.”
Achieving that can be difficult, he adds, as factors that create compelling digital experiences sometimes run counter to the most efficient design and user experience.
Key to Orlebar Brown’s journey was migrating to Shopify and working alongside Shopify Platinum agency partner By Association Only at the start of 2026. The brand has since curated an online experience that combines cinematic imagery, editorially-led layouts and playful copywriting to create a digital flagship that is unmistakenly Orlebar Brown.
Natalia Howard, head of merchant strategy at By Association Only, says preserving the brand’s personality online is central to every project. For Orlebar Brown, this meant focusing not just on the look of the website, but the use of words and copywriting.
“Orlebar Brown has very playful typography. It has a very witty tone of voice that we helped weave throughout the site. You’ll see bold, red, punchy text and witty prose that the team has written, which then really helps transport the customer to these aspirational holiday destinations,” she explains.
Importantly, the team resisted the temptation to overcrowd the experience with conversion-focused tools that might weaken the branded experience.
“We try not to dilute the brand by going too far with conversion-driving features,” says Howard. “Orlebar Brown has done a great job online of bringing the brand to life without adding features that just create a frustrating user experience for the customer.”
The site also works hard to communicate craftsmanship. In stores customers can see, touch and feel the quality. Well trained store staff are also on hand to enrich experiences and tell the story about the brand. Online, that experience has been recreated digitally. Close-up photography highlights textures, stitching and signature details such as the tailoring-inspired fasteners on the brand’s classic swim shorts, helping justify premium price points and reinforcing the brand’s reputation for quality.
One of the key developments that both Kumar and Howard spotlight is Orlebar Brown’s digital lookbook. Taking pride of place on the site’s main navigation bar and featuring nearly 50 different outfits photographed beside sparkling seas, the feature seamlessly blends editorial inspiration and commerce with its simple “Shop the look” feature. This entices online customers to easily purchase entire outfits at the click of a button – for example, including a shirt, trousers, sunglasses and shoes. It has proven to be an effective tool for male shoppers, who typically value ease, convenience and guidance when shopping and curating outfits.
Orlebar Brown’s Shop The Look element, within its Lookbook feature
“It has great, high-impact photography with gorgeous models in these outfits with amazing vivid backdrops. It makes it easy for the customer to see exactly which products the model is wearing, and that is not always the case with online lookbooks,” says Howard.
The strategy appears to be working. While the imagery and editorial content help establish a sense of impending holiday excitement, customers are also responding strongly to the tools that help them build complete outfits.
Kumar says one of the most revealing discoveries has been just how much customers engage with digital product recommendation features.
“Last month 10% of our UK revenue came from our ‘you may also like’ or ‘goes well with’ carousels on product detail pages,” she says.
That behaviour has encouraged the team to think more broadly about wardrobe building across the website. “It tells us that they are really interested in curating wardrobes and they’re looking for us to give them that inspiration,” explains Kumar.
The site also includes quick-add functionality, allowing customers to browse and purchase from collection pages without having to click through to individual product pages. It is a small detail, but one that reflects the brand’s broader philosophy of balancing seamless and simplified convenience and shopability with content and inspiration.
The brand uses personalisation platform Nosto to tailor online experiences based on customer behaviour and purchase patterns.
“We have a lot of VIP customers and we want their experience to be a little bit different to a new customer,” says Kumar.
Yet some of the most significant personalisation happens behind the scenes. Shopify’s unified commerce infrastructure helps Orlebar Brown to bring together customer data from its online store and offline shops, creating a single view of the customer across the business.
Orlebar Brown
Shopify’s Homer says this has been particularly important for a retailer like Orlebar Brown, whose customers often shop internationally in its range of destination stores.
“It has high-profile, high-expectation customers who want to be able to have a tailored approach online,” he explains.
A customer might browse a product online, then purchase at Heathrow Airport before boarding a flight to France. When they then visit one of Orlebar Brown’s French stores, sales associates can access their purchase history and provide more personalised recommendations.
“That whole ‘clienteling’ piece – which focuses on forming individual, long-term and highly personalised relationships with customers – and being able to have that unified view of the customer has been enormously successful for the brand,” says Homer.
Maintaining a consistent sense of brand identity becomes significantly more challenging when customers are engaging with Orlebar Brown across multiple countries, languages and channels.
The retailer now operates five international websites, supports seven currencies and serves customers through more than 60 physical stores worldwide. Yet whether a shopper visits the brand in London, Sydney, St Tropez or online, the experience needs to feel recognisably Orlebar Brown.
Achieving that consistency requires considerable technological infrastructure beneath the surface. Kumar describes Shopify as the foundation that enables the business to deliver the premium experience customers expect.
“It’s a robust platform,” she says. “It is able to handle that complexity, but then on top of it offer the flexibility where we can have a bit more of a premium experience.”
The retailer uses Shopify Markets to manage international operations, alongside Shopify POS across its global retail estate. Additional integrations, including OneStock, help optimise inventory and enable endless aisle services, ensuring customers can access products regardless of where stock is physically located.
The result is a seamless, unified operation, allowing the customer to experience a luxury level experience wherever they happen to be shopping.
Innovation is also part of the Orlebar Brown strategy. The team regularly experiments with new features, designs and user experiences through A/B testing tools such as Shoplift, a third party app on the Shopify App Store. Rather than spending months developing new functionality before launch, Shopify’s flexibility means new ideas can be tested quickly online with real customers and refined based on performance.
“The ability to test things without having to commit to massive development or long timelines has been a real improvement for us,” says Orlebar Brown CMO Hardy.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is another area of active exploration. AI-powered recommendation engines, customer service tools and conversational experiences are all being tested, although the brand remains careful not to adopt technology simply because it is trending. It has to add value to the shopping experience.
Looking ahead, Orlebar Brown’s approach to innovation is key to keeping up with evolving customer behaviours, particularly as growing numbers of shoppers are discovering brands via agentic AI platforms such as ChatGPT, according to Shopify’s Homer. “Brand.com becomes both showroom and a system of record. Less grid scrolling, more guided flows: ‘Help me build a travel capsule’, ‘Match this jacket’, or ‘Refit last season’s trousers’. Merchandising leans into bundles, looks and services. Product detail pages deepen on fit, fabric, provenance and care information. On-site AI assistants use brands’ and retailers’ data, guardrails and voice. Fashion businesses need to be preparing their websites for this agentic AI shift.”
For Orlebar Brown it all comes back to Sunny and what he would want from his online shopping experience – and, most importantly, it must encapsulate the brand ethos: “Feel summer”.
A look at Orlebar Brown’s tech stack
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