How I designed a curated shopping experience.

Social media gave me exposure to the world.
The great thing about social media is that you get exposure to the world. Depending on your passion, what you care about the world varies. As a designer, my lens is focused on works that are well-designed. To me, well-designed usually means simple and minimal, or “basic” (my millennial friends out there know what I mean).

Instagram allowed me to share what I loved.
The desire to share what I love (and get famous 😉) eventually resulted in creating a second Instagram account aside from my personal one, where I reposted designs I had an appreciation for. People with the same tastes would express their agreement through likes and comments.
I realized their was a business opportunity.
The entrepreneur in me, couldn’t help but want to shift this new hobby into a business. I soon discovered that there was an opportunity for me to share real products I love to a community with similar interests, and make commission off those products. I was stoked for this new project idea and I was determined to make it a reality.

I’m obviously not the first to come up with this type of business model — it’s everywhere. Notably, canopy.co, fancy.com, and lyst.com.
I set some goals…
This was the point in time when I put my designer hat on and really had a chance to think about what I wanted my platform to be and how I was going to make it possible. Here were some of my design objectives:
- Share-friendly. The sharing aspect which I loved about Instagram was an important component that couldn’t go away.
- On-brand. The content had to be “on-brand”, geared toward lovers of minimal and simple aesthetics.
- Diverse content. The content and sources had to be diverse (with each affiliate partnership I obtained).
- Participatory. Lastly, people should be able to contribute products to the website!

Once I knew what I wanted to do, I ran with it.

I ended up building my project on Tumblr. The great thing about Tumblr is that it’s free. You can upload unlimited amounts of content and have the flexibility to make your site look the way you want with a bit of magic code.
Instagram would be one of my main platforms to gain exposure. Tumblr would be the product. With that plan set,
I ran with it.
Like Uncle Nike would say, “JUST DO IT”, I just did it.
A lot of the design process was fluid. As I developed new ideas for content organization or style, I adopted my designs. Sometimes you just have to build something (or what we call “prototyping” in the design community) to unleash some more creative juices.

That’s how KI-BON came to life.
There we have it. That’s how I came to design a curated shopping experience. This is the part where I do a shameless plug:
Visit Kibon.co, a curated shopping portal for lovers of simple, minimal, and basic goods.
Ki-bon is a Korean word “기본", meaning basic, foundational, essential. It was the perfect word to describe the type of content I wanted to display.
Thanks for reading.
-Roy Kim
