Fashion brand dace has launched a universal shopping application for Apple’s iPad and iPhone featuring a presentation of the designer’s Spring 2010 clothing line.

Powered by Sprella’s Catalyst platform, the application also features dace’s latest brand video, a store finder to help consumers find boutiques that sell dace clothing and social sharing via email and Facebook, as well as the designer Dace Moore’s Twitter feed. Sprella believes this provides a glimpse of the future of the iPad as an excellent platform for shopping and commerce.

“We never thought of creating an app until Sprella contacted us and introduced us to the idea,” said Adele Tetangco, marketing and accounts manager at dace, Vancouver, BC. “Our online sales and traffic have only increased yearly since we brought our business online, so we figured that adding another interactive gateway for our followers to get in touch with our collections would only help to make traffic and sales increase more.

“As well, we thought that it would be fun to give something back to our shoppers,” she said. “Now they can carry a little bit of dace with them in their pockets where ever they go.”

Ms. Tetangco said that cace is a boutique-oriented brand, and that the woman shopping for dace is probably between 18 and 45 years of age.

“She may or may not shop in commercial areas, but she will go to a boutique and pur¬chase dace because she is looking for something that is different, but timeless,” Ms. Tetangco said. “We’re really excited about the awesome job that Sprella has done, so we will be promoting by reaching out to our existing fans via email, Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

“We’ll also be sending out a press release to all our of media contacts,” she said. “How can we not?

“They did such a good job.”

The dace application runs on both the iPad and the iPhone, with interfaces designed specifically for each form factor. As an iPad application, it is fully orientation-aware.

The application is free in the App Store.

The business value of the application is in both marketing to drive greater visibility for the dace brand, as well as drive product purchases.

The application was built on Sprella’s iPhone and iPad platform Catalyst, which lets the company create fully native applications for retailers in 30 days.

The platform harnesses the capabilities of the iPhone platform and enables retailers to publish engaging applications for their customers.

Customers can explore products, videos and engage with the brand.

Sprella claims it has designed the Catalyst platform so that the resulting applications are not just small-form-factor Web sites, but experiences that are free of the old constraints of Web-based ecommerce.

The company mixes insights taken from print and video marketing with digital.

One step at a time
Sprella can also enable commerce from within the application, although the initial version of the dace application has not yet added that capability.

From a technology perspective, Sprella strives to enable brands and retailers to deliver an engaging experience to their fans via the mobile channel.

“Exploring a brand or shopping doesn’t always happen when you’re in front of a computer, so our platform is a great way to enable that,” said Greg Whelan, cofounder/principal of Sprella LLC, Vancouver. “We’re fascinated to see what the social dynamics of iPad use will be.

“Word-of-mouth marketing is also a lot more effective when you can show a interactive product image from your mobile device,” he said.

The Sprella Catalyst platform has support for mobile commerce, but the dace application hands-off to their existing Web site for commerce.

“We think this is a good way to incrementally adopt mobile commerce,” Mr. Whelan said. “We’re building connectors to support multiple back-end systems for streamlined commerce integration for iPad and iPhone apps, while also supporting alternate payment mechanisms in-app, such as Amazon Payments and PayPal.”