I recently discovered Martin+Osa (
www.martinandosa.com), a new retailer developed by American Eagle that is reminiscent of Banana Republic and J.Crew. Although somewhat less trendy than their competition, their clothes are very classy and the customer service within the store is better than I've experienced anywhere. What really made me fall in love with the company was their website - particularly the slick and usable layout on their clothing detail page.
One of my biggest hesitations about shopping for clothes online is the fact that most online clothing retailers don't show large/detailed enough images of their clothing, or in the event they do, the site uses annoying pop up windows and/or tacky JavaScript-based image magnifiers. I was very pleased when browsing the Martin+Osa site to see that neither of these methods are used, but instead a nearly 1000 pixel wide image of the product is used as the background and subtle transparent layers of text are placed over top.
Each product has a number of tasteful photographs to see various perspectives and detail, and the images are instantly loaded using JS/Ajax, so no page refresh is required. Choosing different color varieties of the same product instantly loads a new background image and set of thumbnails, again requiring no page refresh. Finally, when you add an item to your cart, an animated JS shopping cart layer pops open to let you know the item is in your cart, and you again, never have to leave the page or refresh.
It is refreshing (no pun intended) to see a clothing retailer pushing the envelope and raising the bar for online clothes shopping.
