Creating and Managing Content in Fashion eCommerce: Lessons from Aether Apparel

Building PDPs as Digital Shopping Assistance

If you're shopping for a winter jacket in the middle of a hot summer, you need to check if the jacket you’ve chosen will keep you warm. But how do you do that when the temperatures are high?

That was part of the feedback Aether’s customer service received from their clients. Evan recommends using feedback and questions from potential and existing customers to create in-store and online experiences that will help better understand how products work.

When it comes to winter jackets temperature range, Aether Apparel has a creative answer. Rather than asking you to trust the warmth ratings on a tag, they invite you into their "freezer hut" – a temperature-controlled chamber where you can test the jacket in real winter conditions. It's this tangible, trust-building experience that Backes and his team had to translate into the digital realm.

↑ The inside of the freezer hut where customers can test the warmth of jackets.

"We need to think of the commerce site as a different version of our physical stores," Backes explains. Their solution? Transform product detail pages from mere spec sheets into digital shopping companions. Detailed temperature ranges, fabric specifications, and real-world performance data don't just inform – they recreate that moment of clarity you get when trying on a jacket in the freezer hut."

↑ Aether showcases technical specifications in a way that's easy to understand.

This strategy serves multiple purposes:

• Anticipates and answers common customer questions proactively
• Reduces the load on customer support
• Helps customers make confident purchasing decisions
• Creates a more engaging shopping experience

Keep Brand Consistency Across All Pages

Every design decision in an eCommerce site should reflect and reinforce brand identity. Consistency isn’t just about using the same logo everywhere – it’s about maintaining the soul of your brand across every digital touchpoint.

The traditional customer journey of Homepage > Product Listing Page > Product Detail Page is no longer the norm. “We know a lot of customers enter the site from other pages other than the traditional homepage funnel. So, how do you make those reflect the same sensibility?” asks Evan. This insight led to ensuring brand storytelling extends beyond the homepage.

For Aether Apparel, this attention to detail extends to the smallest elements of the user interface. Typography plays a crucial role in maintaining and evolving brand identity. The brand made a significant change when they switched from Proxima Nova, which they had used for six to seven years, to Maison Neue family which allows for a variety of uses – extended for headlines and a Mono face for technical details.

Even seemingly minor design decisions can have a significant impact on brand perception. As Backes notes, "We had a conversation when we were relaunching the site about whether to round the corners on the buttons. We had square buttons since the very beginning, do we change? Despite rounded corners being common place these days, our inspiration was actually drawn from the control panels of aircraft cockpits."

Think About Photography and Video Content

Aether Apparel founders have extensive Hollywood experience as producers. That’s why they put an immense level of attention to every detail in their store – both online and brick-and-mortar.

Product photography is the opening line of a story. If it doesn't grab you immediately, you might never discover the rest of the narrative. For Aether, each product photo needs to do more than showcase a jacket or a pair of boots – it needs to transport you to the mountains where that gear will become part of your adventure.

Video content plays its own crucial role, but like a well-paced story, it requires careful orchestration. "Our video editor, Aaron does these really great edits you see on our Instagram or YouTube," Backes explains, "but for the website, I often ask for locked-in static shots. We want to slow the pacing down, make it feel less like a movie trailer and more like a moment you can step into."

Create Various Forms of Rich Editorial Content

Aether serves up content in different formats, each designed to satisfy different needs, for brand engagement. Their "Restless Spirits" series feels more like a documentary series than marketing content – five-minute video portraits that paint intimate pictures of artists and adventurers, accompanied by thoughtfully written profiles that dig deeper into their stories.

The brand's digital journal has evolved beyond the traditional blog format, becoming a window into the Aether lifestyle. One week you might find yourself virtually tagging along on a motorcycle trip through the Sierras, the next diving into the technical intricacies of their latest weatherproof fabric. These aren't just product stories; they're adventure narratives where the gear plays a supporting role to the human experience.

Their shoppable lookbooks break free from the conventional grid of product photos, instead weaving items into visual stories that could easily be mistaken for adventure magazine spreads. And in a delightful bridge between digital and physical, their quarterly catalogs function more like lifestyle publications, complete with QR codes that transport readers from printed page to immersive online content with a simple scan.

↑ Aether blends their digital and offline assets, for example, by printing high-quality catalogues and uploading them on their website.

↑ F.A.T Ice Race was one of many creative campaigns run by Aether Apparel.

But can you connect this rich editorial experience with the transactional side of eCommerce? Of course, you can. Aether's story about the F.A.T Ice Race is not only a great example of storytelling. Potential clients can also buy products by clicking on the photos. They are directed to the product's page which makes the whole experience frictionless.

A proper Content Management System (CMS) should empower marketing and brand teams to move quickly with any new ideas. In the fast-paced eCommerce world, you need to change your homepage a couple of times per month, test, iterate, add content, do real-time marketing... If you depend on a development team whenever you need to change anything on your page, you’re locked and don’t fully own the editorial experience.

Developing Sections

Behind every great storyteller lies a well-organized library of… sections. For Aether's digital presence, this library is stored in Sanity CMS. "We've got kind of a robust amount of sections to work from," Backes shares, "and it keeps sort of these boundaries which I think is actually quite helpful." Think of it as having a collection of well-crafted sentences and paragraphs ready to be assembled into new stories. Sections are a part of a larger modular system, which allows for a lot of flexibility in layout options.  And this is a crucial piece. On the one hand, you need to give proper tooling for the creative team, but on the other tech team needs to ensure the site will be performant. Finding a balance is a true art.

↑ Multiple sections with live preview are available in the CMS.

Content Management Workflow

Reusable components make the whole team work better together and help maintain not only the website but also every other piece of content used for storytelling.

Figma is the real powerhouse of this process. Firstly, Figma’s component library mirrors CMS capabilities, allowing for easy collaboration between web manager, marketing director, and owners.

Secondly, Figma is a great place for quick prototyping of new components. The tool ensures designers have creative freedom and doesn’t use up the time of developers. For example, at Aether Apparel, Evan and his team created sets of components that reflect the UI of the website. Thanks to this, every new design is consistent with Aether’s branding and the engineering team can quickly re-use the work that had been already done.

↑ In Figma, there are stored all versions of how the page evolved over time.

Most Desired CMS Features

The storytelling effort wouldn’t be possible to showcase properly without a robust CMS system in place.

At Commerce-UI, we worked with various content management systems and Sanity is our go-to solution. We’re a certified Sanity partner.

Key features that make content management efficient include:

• Page-building capabilities with reusable content blocks
• Live preview with multiple viewports (desktop and mobile simultaneously)
• Automatic image optimization and compression
• Cropping images within the CMS
• Warning system for missing alt text and content requirements
• Efficient video content management with automatic optimization

Authentic Adventure Programs

For the storytelling to be truly immersive, it should expand beyond digital or brick-and-mortar shops. Aether organizes camping trips and rallies that blur the lines between product testing and community building. Picture a group of adventurers gathered around a campfire in Joshua Tree, sharing stories while testing new gear under the desert stars. These aren't just marketing events – they're chapters in an ongoing narrative where products, people, and purposes intertwine.

Member-Exclusive Benefits

Every great story needs its inner circle of dedicated readers. Aether nurtures these relationships through:

• priority access to limited-capacity events,
• early peeks at new collections, and
• ambassador programs that transform customers into characters in the brand's evolving narrative.

But recently, Aether built their Insider Membership. Users can also access their order history or return an item. There are multiple incentives to join the program, for example, 20% discount on all products, concierge services or first in line for ticketed events and trips.

↑ Aether Apparel offers a premium experience for existing customers.

Print & Digital Synthesis

The brand creates quarterly catalogs that serve as cornerstone marketing collateral, strategically integrating multiple value drivers:

• Adventure storytelling and travel photography
• Technical gear insights and care guides
• QR codes linking to additional digital content
• Community spotlight features

↑ Printed catalogs are usually a very popular marketing asset.

The future of fashion eCommerce content lies in finding the perfect balance between brand storytelling and functional commerce features. As Backes notes, "You have to find your own version of everything... no one owns a framework per se—you own your own content." Success requires understanding your brand's unique story and audience, creating content that works across multiple touchpoints, and maintaining technical excellence while preserving creative freedom.

In this digital age, successful fashion brands aren't just selling products – they're inviting customers into stories where they can see themselves as the protagonist. Whether it's through the crystal-clear narrative of a product page or the community-building power of real-world adventures, each element must work in concert to create an experience that's as compelling as it is authentic.