Luxury made accessible from the comfort of your home

When talking about luxury clothing, most of us imagine a fancy fashion house, where customers shop
for exclusive garments. However, even the most luxurious experience does not guarantee them
finding the perfect fit based on their body type or style preferences. Besides, no one wants to see their
new favorite piece being worn by someone else at the same event unless they want to be featured in
a “Who Wore It Better” article. This is one of the many reasons people prefer to go to their favorite
designers to have a custom outfit made especially for them. But what if your favorite designer lives
across the globe? Or what if you don’t have time to constantly go for a fitting?

NB44 came up with the perfect solution and needed our help to bring it to life. They thought of a digital
experience which would help its users receive an exclusive collection of custom-made garments
every season, while being able to register both their size and their style preferences through the
NB44 application without having to leave the comfort of their home. The app would also allow its
users to order exclusive garments for a special event they plan to attend with the help of their very
own digital concierge.

Understanding the online luxury space to build a
competitive product

The client came to us with a clear vision on what they wanted the application to be like. Our task was
to take that vision, improve it by using our expertise in the field and translate it into a user-friendly
experience accessible even to our less tech-savvy users.

In order to align with the client and understand the product we were going to build, we conducted a
number of workshops to make sure we were fully equipped with all the information necessary to build
a competitive product.

We analyzed the competitors in our problem space to learn more about the trends in the luxury
fashion market in order to adopt their best practices and fix any gaps in the user experience when
building our product. We audited 12 competitor websites, including Banana Republic, Christian Dior
and Chanel.

Getting to know our users to build a user-centric
experience

In order to better understand who we will be buildings this product for, we conducted some user
interviews with potential users to understand their goals, needs, pain points and frustrations. Some
common goals and needs they mentioned were having a personal stylist, being able to receive luxury
clothing at your doorstep, etc. Some of the frustrations points most of our participants mentioned
were uncertainty towards ongoing trends, bad advice towards their personal style, etc.

Based on our findings we identified three user personas for this product: The Royalty, The Self-Made
Man and The Decision Maker. This helped us gain a different perspective on the product and show
empathy when making important design decisions.

Creating a seamless experience which addresses our
users’ needs

The biggest challenge we had when creating the low-fidelity wireframes was to come up with a
seamless onboarding experience which would not overwhelm our users while letting the NB44 team
collect enough information about them to be able to create their collection. The onboarding consisted
of two parts – the one where users registered their interest of wanting to join NB44 and the in-app
onboarding, where we were to collect their payment and size information. During our interviews
some of our users admitted finding questionnaires incredibly challenging, so we had to keep this in
mind to be able to present the onboarding questions in a fun and engaging manner.

Making the two parts of the onboarding stylistically different when it came to both the visuals and the
interactions was one of the many ways we made the process more engaging. We also made sure to
include as few open ended questions as possible, so that the user can move to the next step with a
single click. Additionally, we included fun animations and interactions to spark user interest and make
this onboarding experience unique.

Creating a compact design system

As we moved into the high fidelity phase, the NB44 team gave us all the important branding assets,
including the logo, the colors and the fonts they wanted us to use when designing the experience.
This gave us a solid base when starting to build the design system. The challenge however was to
make sure that the assets of the physical brand looked good within the actual digital product and
complimented the clothing line itself.

We decided to treat these creative constraints as an opportunity to make the brand assets pop
among other components and become a unanimous part of the experience. We had to slightly modify
the color hues and the typography to comply with the accessibility guidelines, as well as make sure
that the typography matched the overall look and feel of the application. Additionally, when building
certain components, such as progress bars, pop-ups, navigation items, etc., we had to ensure that
they speak to the brand and compliment the NB44 logo, the sketches provided by the client and so on.

Turning our client’s vision into a refined experience

Using the mood boards the client provided us with as an inspiration, we started to design the high
fidelity screens by making sure the visual experience translates the luxury of the brand itself. We
wanted to keep the visuals as minimalistic as possible so that the elements do not conflict with the
images of the garments themselves which were supposed to stand out. We decided to incorporate a
lot of linear elements which would match NB44’s brand identity and make the visual experience look
expensive, simple and refined at the same time.

Another challenge we had to face here was coming up with layouts which would accommodate the
long copy the clients provided us with without making the application look too text-heavy.

We are proud to say that we managed to take all of those challenges and turned them into
opportunities. We ended up designing a simple, elegant and intuitive experience which feels like part
of the NB44 brand.

Ongoing development process

NB44 was successfully handed over to our developers and is currently in its development phase. We
are truly proud of the experience we designed and are impatiently waiting for the upcoming release of
the application. The NB44 website, where the users can inquire about the membership, is currently
live and can be viewed here.