BRIXTON
eCommerce / Design Systems / Identity
Role: Art Direction, Design Team: Marketing Team, eCommerce Team, BVA
The dreaded replatform... After years of issues with our previous ecommerce platform, we finally took the plunge to take on a new backend, along with incorporating all new brand design and identity. A mighty task considering all the elements of design that needed to be updated, rearranged, and in a lot of cases built from the ground up. With the help of our partners at BVA we were able to create a product that increases sales, decreases load time, looks amazing and will scale for growth. We experience a delay on the tech side and implemented launch into Spring ’21 with an extremely diminished team, oh 2020...
Brixton 2.0
The Next Step
After our last marketing campaign had taken its course, we started the process of a complete rebrand, which included a new logo identity and a new course of action for marketing campaigns across photography, videography and digital applications.
Using learnings from the entire “Done Proper” campaign experience, I realized that going into this replatform and redesign (with launch scheduled after the news of the Covid-19 pandemic) that we needed to simplify our site and advertising’s design components and functionality in order to make updates and experiences quicker and easier for our leaner internal team to manage. We all still liked the overall theme, but as the person in charge of getting all the collateral made, I pushed for us to pare down a little to let our photography and product shine, and most importantly make production of all these assets more realistic given our size. I wanted us to make use of white space to replicate a traditional fashion magazine editorial/advert feel. White space can be tricky because there is nothing for any other content to hide behind, but our photographic content helps us deliver exactly the type of brand shopping experience we were after.
Previous Homepage/Styling
Updating Our Identity
Unifying The Design
We intended to stick to our “Done Proper” marketing campaign, featuring a new typography kit, updated photographic treatments and layouts, but never really executed this completely on our site due to a number of complications. We were up against it constantly on our last platform (I won't name names...) so getting development in this area was always put on the back burner.
Now, with a chance to start fresh, we took advantage and built a site that checks off all the necessary boxes for having a successful ecommerce business, but I made sure it was a site a designer can be proud of.
I mostly stuck with existing campaign colors, added some tonal variants, and paired them with our new layout that includes a heavy does of white space for that fashion magazine aesthetic. For typography, I incorporated our existing campaign fonts which includes Times with a tighter kerning for headlines (originally this was Scheherazade, which was essentially just Times with some spacing differences, I opted to go the web-safe route and just run Times), along with Aktiv Grotesk, which is a beautiful Swiss modern sans-serif that’s akin to Helvetica.
COLOR
TYPOGRAPHY
STYLE SHEET
The Finished Products
Global Application
With all of the elements in place, we were able to utilize them across all elements of our new site, from the Homepage, to the PLP and collection pages, all the way down to the footer.
From there, I incorporated into one of our most important revenue-drivers, classic email marketing. I designed a minimal template that replicated our new site experience and visual system, and made it modular for all types of merchandising opportunities, from top to bottom funnel. For this template, I specifically focused on providing an optimal experience on mobile, while also being sure to thread that same premium and minimal feel into its parts that were responsive and simple for users to digest each emails information. No designing and exporting as stacked/sliced jpgs and hoping everything renders/reads properly. We were also informed that the site’s blog needed extra work and wouldn't be available for launch (and still isn’t), so I made sure there were options to blend editorial-type stories into specific EDMs with larger stories that were often accompanied by a customized landing page experience.
The marketing team had evolved the scripting of our entire content calendar to be based on email marketing stories, so whenever we had a larger story to tell or GTM product push, I accompanied them with social media assets that followed the same lead.
ECOMMERCE
2.0 Homepage — Created with fully modular components.
Endemic and Collaborative Custom PLPs
EDM
Main Template/Styling
Example of Amplified Week of Email Creative and Promotions
Typical GTM and Product Focused Emails
Specialty Story and Collaboration
VIDEO ADVERTS
Storyboarding/Concepting to create ads from existing assets on the fly.
SOCIAL ASSETS
So far so good. Sales are cranking and I'm very happy with just about everything we ship to our audience and partners. The next step is building upon these successes, and delving way deeper into the editorial side of our marketing. With such stiff competition in the DTC apparel market, this is how we’ll stand out for years to come.
