nb44

How we made luxury

clothing accessible from

the comfort of your home
Platforms
Mobile
Deliverables
UI, UX, Product Strategy,

Design System
Visit NB44


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.