Louboutinize — The iPhone App With The Red Sole
The red sole of Christian Louboutin’s footwear is well known all around the world, especially in the world of fashion and culture. How to provide online recognition not only to the shoes but more importantly — to their owners? This goal was set up by La Moulade, an advertising agency who designed Louboutinize application for iPhone. Code&Pepper took care of its development.
The biggest technological challenge was image processing which is the main function of this application. Some of the applied solutions exceeded today’s well known Snapchat or Prisma apps.
The application was launched in August 2015. #Louboutinize hashtag was spread across social media like in a flash.
Application concept
The application inspires Christian Louboutin’s clients to discover new fashion trends, but it is also a gadget to play with. La Moulade, a UK agency responsible for creative design, together with the brand owner, created a perfect combination where style is joined with humour. And this is humour that is all about in Louboutinize not only the functionality. You can play with the application using one of five filters, which will process your iPhone picture in real time. In the end you can share the “louboutinized” picture with your friends.
Feed of inspiration
The user can view the latest “louboutinized” featured photos presented on the homescreen feed. The photos are selected from social media channels and loaded to the app through Olapic API. Olapic API is also used for publication in web service #LouboutinWorld, so all content management of Louboutinize app is very easy.
Apart from the photo and its author we can also see the description (and yes yes, the all present emoji are also loaded through Olapic API).
And how to get such a trendsetting photo by yourself? A “call to action” button could only be named as “I WANT TO LOUBOUTINIZE!”.
Filters
The essence of the application and the main tool for great fun are 5 filters:
- Rouge — the world by Louboutin means a touch of black humour on a different planet — could that be Mars?
- Holidays — this filter was made for winter holidays instead of a typical Xmas card.
- Masquerade — an invitation for carnival ball will be more attractive if we enrich our selfie with Christian Louboutin accessories.
- Legs — the oldest trick in the book — we change legs!
- Crystallize — crystal bottle of new nail varnish can also change the reality, just shake it!
Isn’t it suchlike some recently popular application?
Prisma vs. Louboutinize
The latest hit in mobile applications is Prisma. It processes a photo into a very attractive graphic, mosaic or impression. But it does it only after taking a photo. In Louboutinize picture is processed instantly in most of the filters. Thanks to this solution the effects are visible immediately and it allows for setting up a desired frame. From technological point of view this was the biggest challenge. We had to find the way to overcome GPU restrictions in iPhone 4 (low-end model for playing with the app).
Karol Piatkowski, Senior Mobile Developer in Code&Pepper, recalls working on the app:
It was a very interesting and engaging challenge. It allowed for quite many experiments and advancements in an algorithm itself. Due to specific mobile GPU limitations we were forced to find some workarounds. Processing an image, especially for entertainment use, consists of few cunning tricks (analogy of “smoke & mirrors” effect used in movies). For example, for Crystallize filter it was impossible to achieve the same effect in real time in older mobile devices (dividing the photo into triangles according to detected edges). It was replaced by imposing distortion with triangle shape crystals, which looks equally impressive but was much less complicated to use in alogorithm.
Social media rule
A picture processed this way you can easily share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Chinese Weibo. A new hashtag #louboutinize was created and it prefills description when photo is shared in social media. This allowed for a really quick start in fashion social media. But has this solution brought expected social network results? You can check it by searching hashtag #louboutinize on Instagram. All illustrations of the filters (apart from our panda above) come from real social media channels.
Things measured
To get a full scope of the application popularity and receive advanced analitycal data we have implemented Mixpanel tools in Louboutinize.
As seen at Mixpanel we “louboutinized” China, Indonesia, US, Europe… What about you? Does your iPhone have a “louboutinized” red soleinstalled?
Client feedback
Code & Pepper provided our business with excellent support in the areas of iOS application development. I can confidently recommend Code & Pepper as a solid and reliable supplier, and experts in their field.
Marie Thizy
Managing Director and Co-founder of La Moulade
Do you need team for web or mobile app development? We’re happy to help.
