A New Ecommerce Business: Plan & Design

Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse was one of the last retail brands that did not have an online shoppable website as of 2012. We helped this client plan, build, and launch their new website as well as plan their email / e-commerce marketing calendar, plan and implemented all of their social media, and planned an online shoe magazine connected to the site for additional branded content. Below are examples of some of the pages from their new site design.

Branded Content: a digital magazine

The Closet was initially conceived to provide additional branded content to help build brand credibility as "the" go-to shoe destination for footwear style advice on seasonal trends. Inspired by several online digital fashion magazines, as well as the curating interactive functions of popular sites such as Polyvore, the new brand strategy was also aiming to attract new fashion-forward consumers who actively curate and share trends on social media.

Creative Notes

This magazine had many names during development, my favorite being SOS - the Shoe Obsessed Society. Our blog-like pages and content are meant to teach consumers more about footwear trends in general: how to style them, how to take a runway look and make it your own, etc.

Shopping, Sharing, & Functionality

Ideally, consumers would be able to curate their favorite looks per season using only the OBSW product found on the site. Consumers would also be able to upload images of how they style their favorite OBSW trends. All sections were shareable on social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter). All product shown on the Closet was designed to have a click-through function directly to the product's product summary page with the ability to add to shopping cart or wish list, as seen below.

Men's Content

Men's content like this was something we hadn't seen before by footwear-specific brands. Though the brand's primary target is female, the brand carries a lot of men's styles and we thought of ways to grow this business as well. Here we have a "how to wear it" section offering style advice on current footwear styles, and a seasonal column where we answer style questions. Consumers could write to us on Facebook and we would pick the top three questions per season to feature here on the site.

Kids Content

The brand carried a substantial amount of kids styles, so supporting this business by showing on-trend styles was important. Similar to the men's section, this type of kids content also didn't exist among current shoe brands. Our aim was to put OBSW ahead of the footwear competition, who focuses mainly on the woman shopper. This was aimed not at kids, but fashion-conscience moms, and provided the chance for a perfect product add-on when shopping.

Final Design

Based on budget and client-side technical constraints, we launched the Closet with paired down content, featuring the seasonal look book and the "straight from the stylist" sections, that we called "Closet Talk." (You can see these videos on my OBSW Fall 1 and Fall 2 pages on this website). Part of the page design was to show the archive of a year's worth of trends as a scroll-down resource for consumers to come back reference (seen below).