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Creating an adaptive content presence for a network of fashion brands
Project Roles
UX Writer, UX Designer
Company
Affliction
Challenge
Affliction began as a single brand with origins in the MMA community. Over time, they expanded their renegade brand aesthetic to additional market segments in near orbit of the MMA community. While the additional brands had opened new revenue opportunities, they also diluted the impact of the original brand.
The existing website was considered by the company to be lacking in the level of graphic presence and emotional content needed to generate deep visitor engagement, as well as having a poor e-commerce experience.
The objective was to build an effective ecommerce experience while also supporting long term content marketing goals. The project presented a particularly unique challenge. Create individuality for a group of four centrally-managed brands that needed the efficiencies of shared infrastructure.
Discovery
A primary requirement of the project was to build for scale. Work done should be leverageable across the parent company’s four brands.
Key to the discovery phase was finding common denomenators among the four brands. In content, features, and technologies. Which, in turn, meant finding the common denomenators in user behavior.
User analysis began with past site analytics to identify key traits and behaviors. Features and content formats popular across all the brands should be more efficient, generating more scalable value than something applicable to only one brand.
Search keyword performance analysis generated a rank list of topics that informed content marketing, feature set, and wireframe decisions.
Competitively, the new site’s ecommerce capabilities were best in class on both user experience and customer service. Features like realtime inventory linking, presentation of outfits, live chat, and product videos exceeded customer experience expectations. While features like email capture, social media integrations and contest capabilities served product marketing well.
While the ecommerce experience would be top of class, the positions of each brand provided strong differentiation.
The foundational personality traits connecting the four brands sprange from the mother brand’s roots in the early days of MMA. Descriptors from the core attributes study included “rebellious”, “confident”, “fearless”, and above all, “authentic”.
As the Affliction site states, “Due to the highly graphic nature of their product, they are not liked by all.”
There was also a quality to the Affliction products which knock-off brands couldn’t equal. This was the brand’s version of ‘walking the walk’. That quality story was a critical demonstration of authenticity for each of the brands.
With the parent company’s personality unifying the brands, creating individuality was the perfect role for content marketing and graphic design. As the final designs attest, colors, fonts and image selection can push a brand in one direction or another. The content each brand delivers further cements the brand image.
Solution
The charge was to build a high-converting ecommerce site, while also creating a compelling content marketing experience. There would be multiple user paths, or funnels, depending on the customer segment and their position in the user journey.
An important function of the site was to emphasize purchasing while quickly providing alternative avenues when users diverted from the happy path. Purchasing was reinforced with other shopping options, live chat, and store contact information. Keeping them engaged while in the purchase funnel.
When the user moved outside of purchase intent behavior, the content and social media marketing assets stepped in to build the customer relationship.
A shared CMS was developed with the idea of minimizing administrative requirements. To maximize value, feature and content options were evaluated based on universality across the brands, as well as extensibility into additional uses. An example was combining the Lookbook and Shop by Detail pages into a single template. Therefore increasing productivity and cost efficiency.
The CMS left a number of attributes customizable. Including color palette, photo themes, background textures, and writing style.
The fashion industry has deep editorial roots. Consumers are not only interested in brands, but the stories around the brands. Home page content modules delivered stories personalized to the users known interests.
In the fashion industry, news stories frequently involve celebrities. Celebrity press is a major driver of brand recognition. With ample celebrity content available, the site was able to take celebrity influence and channel it toward a users product preference.
Of course, the website’s end goal is to sell merchandise. And all roads lead to the product pages. The navigation structure, product categories and individual item pages all treated the product as hero, funneling user interest to these key conversion pages.
Marketing components, such as sharing, were woven throughout the site, creating seamless segues from the shopping experience.
Each product included ratings and reviews content. Simultaneously building community and reassuring potential buyers.
By carefully constructing the site architecture to support the collective goals of each line of business, Affinity Holdings was able to increase the volume and quality of content for each brand, while improving the underlying technology’s efficiencies and reliability.