Ocacia's Brand New site
Jul 08 2021
Our new state-of-the-art website is live and waiting on you. The most advanced African clothing store in the entire world. Our new site features some hot features such as elastic search, a complex lookbook and our new blog post to document the journey of African fashion. Your support keeps authentic African fashion a global option, especially during these challenging times. We do not need aid, we only need trade!
OCACIA 1.0 to OCACIA 3.0
We come from a tech background, our parent company Halaqah has been doing media and IT for 23 years (1998) and that goes a very long way to explain why our sites and our media is top-notch. Because that is what we were doing way before we decided to branch off and get into fashion. We are 100% a multi-media company from day dot. Unfortunately, our Magento 1.9 site started to break down, but we loved it so much. Our first site was pretty poor by comparison. But our Ocacia 2.0 Magento site was amazing. But due to it being no longer supported by PayPal, Magento, the servers etc we had to make the jump. And that jump came at a time when the funds to be doing these big moves was really not there. But what can you do? You have to move, you have to move. So we said if we are going to create a brand new site from zero, we better go big or go home. And you know we not going home. Tech today is different from tech back when we started. There is a lot more specialists with tech companies bringing in the necessary skills when they are needed. We are no different so we hired some coders. But we want to keep Africans employed so we hired a team from Nigeria who did a lot of the big moving of data. The first part went well, the second part was horrendous. And we all know how that story goes. It is not that people from Europe and Asia will not drop the ball and spoil the show--because they will. But why oh why do our people have to always disappoint and prove why we should avoid each other? These guys made so many excuses for the skills they did not have. Finally, in brotherhood fashion, we agreed to part company. It is interesting when we hired someone in India they were able to do all the things the Nigerian team just said were not possible. And here is the problem with the African mindset--while we valued our people enough to give them the contract over say Indians and Eastern Europeans, they did not value us! And the beautify of the project. We might have been Pan-African, but they really did not give a damn. It does take two hands to clap.
The new site had issue after issue and went from 2 weeks to 2 months. But fingers crossed the worst is behind us as this blog is being written on our brand new site.
OUR LOOKBOOK
The lookbook is one cool way to sell the Ocacia look. It now opens the door to more photography briefs. Now we can take real-life situations like a family at a restaurant or playing on the beach and lookbook each Ocacia item they are wearing to showcase the functionality of our designs.
BLOG POST
We had blog post on our Ocacia 2.0 site, but they were so dull we rarely used them. So many flashy features mean we can write about our story. Now our African designerer label can create our own history in great detail.
ELASTIC SEARCH
Try it and see, the minute you type something in the search it brings up the options. Never before has elastic search been available. But that is thanks to the new platform of Magento 2.4.1 (and above). For elastic search to work, we had to move our site to a cloudserver that can handle the extreme data rates and processing to make this search work.
So what is the big deal about Elastic search seen on our new site. Because it is a very big deal for our tailors and for you our clients. What most people do not know is that our website is not only for you guys shopping for cool African clothes, our tailors and embroidery artist and designers use the site to navigate our catalog. How do we know what a Mazrui KMT is? How do we know what type of denim we used on our Bad Boi Jeans? So our site is the repository of all things Ocaica. It is our catalog and our resource also. Elastic search allows us to search everything on the site ultra fast. We can input Red pants (for example) and it seems to have the intelligence to know everything red that we make.
QUICK VIEW
QUICK VIEW is for those that are in a rush. Click the quickview button a pop-up pops up and you just select your options without leaving the page. All these things to make the shopping experience sweeter than sweet.
PRODUCT VIDEOS
We have always had videos, but now we have videos in the product picture page. This is another new feature of Magento 2.