How to reinvent an industry obsessed with the past
The story of how Shop You went from frustration to concept to innovative reality in its mission to shake up women’s fashion.
By the end of the Sydney summer, Kelly Slessor had had enough.
She had spent a number of years working as a mobile marketing consultant to some of the top retail brands in Australia. During this time she was noticing a trend that consumers, especially women, were increasingly shifting to mobile browsing but were frustrated with the same-old ‘catalogue shopping’ approach of browsing fashion. Busy, professional, time-poor women like Kelly were being forced to wade/tap/filter/sort/clear/scroll through hundreds of items, most of which were never right for them to begin with.
Kelly had literally read thousands of fashion app reviews and they told a consistent tale of frustration and disenchantment. Fashion, the industry most obsessed with appearance, had forgotten about user experience.
Noticing a gap that her clients and other retailers were failing to fill, Kelly seized the opportunity to do something about it herself. Which is how she came to be sitting in the Early Days studio in Surry Hills that January morning.
The First Conversation
Over the course of two hours, Kelly told the tale of how mobile fashion e-commerce was failing to embrace the future. It was typically a painful, lengthy and generally vanilla digital experience. Choice had become overwhelmingly inflated and consumers were more and more time poor. Instead of making shopping easier, online stores were cramming massive multi-brand, multi-category product catalogues — originally intended for glossy print brochures and magazines — into small screens that fit in your palm.
This was a problem given that mobile visitors were outstripping desktop and growing much faster. Anecdotal interviews suggested only 2 in 10 women actually enjoyed shopping online. So it was no wonder that average purchase conversion rates were in the low single digits.
The Brief
“I want to create the most personalised and enjoyable fashion app in the world.”
Kelly’s passion and vision was clear. She wanted to create a fashion shopping experience that was second to none. That was fun, snappy and personalised to a women’s individual taste and style.
This is the type of project we love at Early Days. An entrepreneurial leader asking for help to turn their vision into reality.
We knew we had to do several things given the open scope of the challenge. We had to gather insight into the market and customers, rapidly develop some propositions, and then meaningfully validate the concept through prototyping and testing.
The Work
Phase 1: Learn, Sketch and Listen
We kicked off a short, intense research phase that started with understanding current players in the market and how their value propositions compared to customers’ needs. This method is more effective than the classic approach of comparing and mapping competitors against one another, which doesn’t tend to yield much insight. It’s more important to map to what customers want. In the fashion market, these preferences revolve around convenience, price, inspiration, identity and more.
Once we had gleaned insight into how the market was perceived from a customer viewpoint, we rapidly developed some very high level concepts (using pen and paper) that we believed might have resonance with customers and be sufficiently differentiated from existing companies.
This type of research does not require panels of hundreds of shoppers or deep quantitive research. We needed to test and validate broad concepts against a small group of women in our target market.
We recruited 12 women and arranged a series of individual interviews and a group session (appropriate in this industry given the inherently social aspect of shopping).
Early stage testing is a lot of fun, and also very hard. You’re not necessarily clear about your hypotheses, you don’t know a huge amount about the market, and your concepts are high-level enough to almost be flippant.
It’s a time of high uncertainty and your job is to ask and re-ask questions and listen hard to what people do (and don’t) say. You learn over time to ignore the literal feedback and look instead for signals to underlying behaviours, beliefs and needs.
For this first round of testing, we took people through 6 broad concepts. We made up simple artefacts to convey the concept and then went through structured and unstructured discussions.
It takes a day or two of digestion, and mental mining of underlying feedback, after which we had a much better sense of what women actually wanted from a fashion app.
Phase 2: Make and Test
We were able to refine, merge and re-shape two brand new propositions after the first round of testing.
They were based on two clear insights that had emerged:
- Women are indeed frustrated with too much choice, poor suggestions, and little to no personalisation (“It just doesn’t know me”). Which meant that Kelly’s foundational hypothesis had been supported.
- Women ‘shop’ in different ways, with most broadly grouped into ‘intent-based’ (where they know what they want) and ‘inspiration-based’ where they might be looking for ideas, checking out latest items, or just relaxing.
One interesting side-note was that almost all the women we spoke to could not describe their personal style. Instead, they tended to define their style by naming their go-to brands.
To progress further into the solution space, we broke down the core challenges that we had to address.
Challenge 1: Personalisation (and how to prototype it)
Personalisation is driven by intrinsically knowing the makeup of your customer. We prototyped a concept we referred to as — Brand Matrix.
By creating a matrix of style attributes for leading fashion brands cross-referenced with a core set of customer inputted preferences (brand choice, colours, seasons, purchasing behaviour, body shape, height etc) we honed in on being able to surface products of relevance and interest to the customer — fast. This would subsequently allow for the more meaningful recommendation of new brands and products to the customer by aligning one brand’s attributes to another.
The brand matrix would become the foundation of product search and matching for our prototype. While this allowed us to (part) achieve our goal of personalisation, it still lacked a level of intelligence we were looking for.
We didn’t want to simply create a product recommender model. This would still fail us on the personalisation front and wouldn’t be accurate in its evolution as customers will change their preferences and styles radically over time (as trends and seasons change).
We explored the use case of artificial intelligence and machine learning as the technology solution to assist with building out the brand matrix profile over time. Through continued customer interaction, the app would incrementally refine the profile of the customer — ultimately becoming more effective, accurate and quicker with every use. It would also have the potential to generate some extremely valuable data insights for brands eager to understand personal style and browsing preferences.
Challenge 2: Creating a revolutionary and memorable user experience. Fast, fun and personal.
Catalogue-based searching (with hundreds of results) would not provide the experience we needed to bring a level of fun, speed and personalisation to the app. We narrowed the proposition making mobile shopping more like a conversation between two friends. This quickly proved to be well received as a concept.
We brought this idea to life by developing a conversational user interface model akin to a chatbot.
We wanted the customer to be able to message the app in plain language (e.g. I want a long black dress). Given we had built a profile of the customer’s style profile using the brand matrix, we could then present users with a shortlist of options which matched their need and their profile.
The messaging interaction component combined with a tailored search result put the customer in control and the app was working for them (almost like a personal shopping assistant) which enabled them to avoid the hassles, noise and mismatches of traditional mobile shopping.
Challenge 3: Cater for inspirational ‘smart browsing’
We prototyped the idea of curated themes and collections to help women looking for inspiration. This ‘push’ model allowed Shop You to leverage special events, seasons, releases or campaigns so that women could enjoy a browsing experience, again directed through the conversational chatbot.
Maintaining personalisation, the customer could interact through a swipe mechanic of liking / disliking products in these collections allowing for the customer’s style profile to evolve.
Phase 3: Prototype
Let’s bring this thing to life. We knew our client needed some tangible and visually appealing artefacts to support the evidence we had to date prototyped and validated. This in turn would also be used to support and bring to life an investment proposal.
We designed Shop You’s brand and visual identity and created a tappable mobile prototype that brought the entire experience to life. Using Invision Kelly was able to share the prototype with potential investors and future stakeholders to (mock) experience on their device.
The Upshot
The prototype design and revolutionary interface of Shop You quickly caught the attention of investors who backed the startup with a healthy seed funding round. Kelly took the reins from here and did an amazing job of overseeing the build of Shop You through to deployment to the app store.
At time of writing the app has seen thousands of downloads from the app store, hundreds of thousands of in app searches and a successful on-boarding of 50+ leading fashion brands in Australia. These brands not only secure a new route to market within a ground-breaking shopper experience, they also have the potential to access the vast data insights that Shop You is already generating.
Early Days builds digital businesses. We get results for entrepreneurs and business leaders in the areas of product invention, customer experience design and growth.
