For a senior UX design course, our team analyzed the experience of interacting with the brand Italist, an online luxury fashion marketplace based in Los Angeles that partners with boutique stores in Italy.
The purpose of the branding intervention was to evaluate the brand experience of Italist and better surface their unique selling proposition to provide value to the business and their customers.
Ultimately, the project's final form was a website redesign that displays Italist's connection with small boutique stores in Italy, which separates them from their competition.
This video is a demonstration of the website, created with Figma and After Effects:
One of our goals was to foster stronger connections between customers and the boutiques listed on Italist to build familiarity and help inform purchasing decisions.
Users can browse items by boutique, which builds stronger relationships as customers can discover boutiques that match their style.
Returning visitos can skip the introduction to boutiques and view products immediately.
Allowing customers to discover and learn about the boutiques they are purchasing from and browse relevant products they may be interested in.
Boutique owners can drop a tag on an item to give customers a personalized message when browsing items.
Messages from the boutique owners gives a similar experience as walking into boutique stores and listening to recommendations.
Italist claims they want to deliver an experience of shopping Italian boutiques to customers online; however, their current platform falls short as users get lost in the thousands of products listed.
The redesign allows customers to explore products from different boutiques and to learn more about the history of boutiques if they choose to.
To better understand Italist’s brand identity, we first looked into their mission statement, values, tone, and read how customers perceive the company.
I synthesized our findings into three brand pillars that laid the initial framework for the design intervention:
Italist partners with small Italian boutiques to provide authentic and pristine luxury goods to their customers.
Global customers have access to over 1,500 international luxury brands carefully curated by the Italist team and their partner boutiques.
Italist provides greater international reach for their partnered boutiques, allowing international customers to feel as if they are shopping in Italy.
Further expanding on our findings, we conducted user interviews and collected research on consumer habits surrounding luxury fashion goods.
I formed this research into four key insights:
Purchasing decisions are largely affected also by how the brand makes the customer feel.
Users first concern when shopping online luxury fashion is whether the site is reliable.
Italist offers thousands of products making it difficult to find everything on the site
Online shopping eliminates the intimidating atmosphere of boutiques.
Based on our research and insights , we saw an opportunity for Italist to focus on creating a unique experience for their customers rather than enticing people with sales.
This was then framed as a problem statement that we always kept in mind throughout the project:
Italist’s customers are not being served meaningful content about the Italian boutiques because the content is hidden between sales banners and hundreds of popular brands.
The visual design was aimed to elicit similar feelings of experiencing a boutique store in-person and deliver a positive experience to first-time and repeat customers.
The goal with the content design was to better surface the unique partnership that Italist has with Italian boutique stores by creating an online experience that aligns with the feeling of shopping boutique stores in-person.
Users who are curious may learn more about the history of each boutique, while repeat customers can focus on viewing products and styling options from their favourite boutiques.
An invaluable learning outcome that will stick with me is how to work with a diverse group of creative people across business and design with differing perspectives. Additionally, I learned how to balance design goals with that of business and technology.
Understanding where design fits with an existing brand and how to better communicate content that the business has access to. A critical step of effective brand design is understnading who you are designing for before moving to the visual design.