Getting Creative with Data: Meet the Resale Report
Hey. Hi. Hello. Lauren here, thredUP’s resident art director, true crime junkie, and nacho advocate. I’m excited to walk you through my most recent project that is the perfect marriage between data and design. So without further ado, let’s dive in.
Every year, thredUP releases the Resale Report, which serves as the most robust measure of the U.S. secondhand market. The information from the report makes its way into corporate strategy decks, newsrooms across the globe, and gets re-posted on social feeds to both educate and inspire visitors to shop secondhand. Our 2021 Resale Report was a record 73 (digital) pages and garnered 6.29M impressions from 27 news hits, a 10% lift over last year. Sounds like a pretty big deal… and it is!
2021 was a significant milestone for thredUP’s Resale Report — fresh off our rebranding efforts, the entire report got a new look. We featured new brand photography and videos, commissioned specialty illustrations from Yana Belitckaia, updated all the colors & fonts, and gave the UI/UX a facelift. Beyond the updated graphics, it was the data, and more importantly, the message of a circular fashion future, that made this Resale Report a valuable and impactful project to work on.
So what is the Resale Report anyway?
Long story short, it’s a comprehensive study, conducted by third-party retail analytics firm GlobalData, examining the trends and trajectory of the $28B resale apparel market that gets turned into a succinct, digestible, and press-worthy report. This year marks the release of our 9th annual report so I thought I’d start with a bit of background on how the report came to be. The first report was published back in 2013 as a way to highlight brands that best retain their value overtime, helping shoppers make the most of their clothing investments. In 2016, market data was captured for the first time and that’s when the Resale Report really became what it is today, a way to prove out to investors that resale is a huge market and to establish thredUP as a main player in the space. Creative-wise, the first few reports were created by outside contractors because the thredUP team had limited bandwidth. The creative execution was finally brought in-house in 2017.
The report is brought to life by a core team of players from Comms, Finance, Data Science, Engineering(looking at you Jeff Appareti) and of course Creative(that’s me!). The entire report takes about nine months to create, starting with the general strategy alignment all the way to pitching to press with many steps in between. The report is a massive undertaking but so rewarding to see all of that hard work come to fruition.
How did we tackle the 9th Annual Resale Report?
As a designer, there are many things to consider when starting a project like this. First, the previous design execution. As mentioned above, the 2017 report was the first time the creative was done in-house. Here you can see, each section had a ton of information, but there wasn’t a navigation system and the report is pretty static.
In 2020’s report, you can see a major evolution. The information has been simplified, there is a navigation system and animation but the report was designed in our old branding and had a minimal and professional design approach since the world was in the early throes of the pandemic.
When working on a report like this, the target audience needs to be taken into consideration from the start. As a comprehensive study that examines trends in the resale apparel market, the core target audience was investors, press, and other retailers. This meant we needed to pay close attention to how the data was visually presented as well as the “story” each section told as to garner press. The target audience for the report is much different than who we usually speak to at thredUP (our thrifters!) so it was a fun challenge to make that switch and tailor the creative to a new audience.
With any project you work on, there is always the challenge of time. Even though I solely worked on this project for about two months, we were making creative updates up until the moment it launched. Speaking of, a challenge I didn’t expect was working on the same project, and only that project, for an extended period of time! We tackled two sections per week for three weeks straight and then launched into a never-ending cycle of feedback and updates. You get the point. It was exhausting to revisit the same project over and over and not really be able to take a step back and assess how it was coming together. It was a brand new experience, which I’m grateful for. I’m also grateful that every project I work on is not structured in the same way. Okay, enough about challenges, let’s switch gears and talk about the creative journey.
Let’s talk about the creative journey, shall we?
Once the project was kicked off and we had gathered all the data and landed on each section’s narrative, it was time to start designing this thang. It all started with a moodboard (see below!).
After the moodboard was created, I got to work re-skinning the UI from 2020.
Once the moodboard and UI update was approved by all of the stakeholders, we jumped into an initial creative exploration phase and started exploring data interpretation through a creative lens. Once the initial designs were in a good place to share with the broader team, we launched into the feedback and problem-solving cycle and the creative started to evolve into something more final. We then brought in Yana Belitckaia to create custom illustrations and Noelle Murray to create video section dividers to give the report its final polish. Once the designs were in a good place, we partnered with the engineering team to turn the static creative into an interactive website filled with animation and voila, the report was born.
Let’s see this thing already!
If you want to see the report live and in action, take a look here!
Now that it’s all said and done, let’s reflect.
After two months of solely working on this project, I can happily say that I love the final result. When you are working on something and continuously revisiting it day after day, it’s hard to take a step back and see it through fresh eyes. There were moments when I thought the design was too busy, that it was too colorful, that the layouts weren’t interesting, etc. It took some time away from the report to reflect on the process. Now, when I look at the final product, I feel really proud of what we accomplished as a team. Working on the report was really challenging, at times completely exhausting, but it was so rewarding to work on such a unique project like this. I got to partner with stakeholders across the organization as well as third-party contributors, gained new design skills like data visualization while flexing and evolving our evergreen toolkit to move the brand forward.
Oh, AND got to create thredUP’s(and my) first full page ad that ran in the Wall Street Journal. Talk about a milestone! All and all, it was a pretty kick-ass project to be a part of and the best part… it performed better than expected. Like I said earlier, 6.29M impressions from 27 news hits. That’s a 10% lift over the 2020 report.
Alright friends, that pretty much wraps up my recap of the 2021 Resale Report. Hopefully this post gave you insight into how a project like this comes to life from start to finish and got you thinking about what the report will look like this year… stay tuned!
Until next time!
Lauren
