MyGlowBox: a project designed for Microsoft Design Expo
MyGlowBox is the marketplace for clean and sustainable beauty products, a mobile app with innovative features, and a subscription service.
For this project I developed business and marketing strategies, as well as prototyped ML functionality for the mobile app. Together with my teammates I brainstormed, researched, and proved the initial concept, did user survey and user research, prototyped the final product and prepared a few pitching presentations at different stages, and, finally, presented our product to the panel of experts from Microsoft and New York University. Our project made it to the final of the school competition and received very positive feedback from the panelists.
Technology and tools used for prototyping: Figma, Wix.com, Adobe Creative Cloud, Qualtrics, RunwayML, Unity.
Over the Summer and Fall of 2020, I took part in Microsoft Design Expo Challenge. My teammates were beautiful designers and technologists from all over the world: Yiting Liu from China, Dina Khalil from Egypt, Sarah Liriano from the Dominican Republic, Helen Zegarra from Peru, and Ashwita Palekar from India. No wonder that we decided to develop a product for women.
About the product: recorded video presentation
Timings:
Sarah Liriano explains our concept 0:00–3:30
Ashwita Palekar talks about the mobile app 3:30–5:02
Yiting Liu describes AR functionality 5:02–6:13
Dina Khalil walks you through our website 6:13–7:17
Helen Zegarra shows subscription box and sustainable packaging 7:17 -8:51
I (Elena Glazkova) reveal our business and marketing strategy 8:51–11:52
Product breakdown: mobile app
Product breakdown: website
Take a look at the website prototype!
Product breakdown: the sustainable subscription box
- Made from recycled cardboard lined with beeswax to be waterproof.
- The corners rip off as well as other parts of the box as shown to make small pods.
- The insides of the corners/pods have measurements for a one-time use of different products and masks in order not to waste the products.
- The idea is that eventually, people will learn the correct amount of each product to pour for a one-time use.
- The rest of the box can be recycled.
- Another box option made of light aluminum.
- This material can eventually be recycled once it becomes damaged.
- The idea with this option is that people can receive their subscription with a return label that they can use to return it if they wish.
- This option would have an extra cost but returning the box would earn them points in our system.
- If they don’t wish to return the box they can repurpose it (for example as a planter or a lunch or jewelry box).
How we started: brainstorming and user research
The subscription box was the most popular idea among our target users. See the Survey Report by the MyGlowBox team.
Preliminary research: resources
Green Consumer Behavior in the Cosmetics Market
The impact of COVID-19 on the subscription economy
The impact of COVID-19 on e-commerce by category [Updated monthly]
Your ‘clean’ cosmetics might have just 1% organic ingredients
Research Insights
- Numbers represented in this research — Green Consumer Behavior in the Cosmetics Market second MyGlowBox user research results. This research is more detailed than ours but the results are similar.
- “The impact of COVID-19 on the subscription economy” article shows that 53.3% of subscription-based businesses have not seen a significant impact on their subscriber acquisition rates, while 22.5% of companies are seeing their subscription growth rate accelerate. Also this article — “The impact of COVID-19 on e-commerce by category [Updated monthly]” proves that the Health&Beauty sector is showing significant growth in e-commerce.
- Confessions of a sustainable beauty brand founder: “There is greenwashing in every corner of the industry”. This article lists the challenges that sustainable beauty brand faces and proofs that such brands need a lot of support.
Celebrity face yoga built with machine learning!
We added the feature with face fitness, where your instructor is a Hollywood star, to the MyGlowBox mobile app and named it Face Yoga.
Face yoga by MyGlowBox is a set of non-invasive facial workouts approved by dermatologists, therapists, actors and singers, and other professionals that deal with wellness and beauty and need to maintain lively, responsive, and charming facial mobility.
Note: our app is not about making you look younger no matter what.
It’s about building and opening your charm by exploring you bone and muscle structure, working on your muscle relaxation, posture, articulation and mental state.
Exercises we used for prototyping and TESTING*:1. You need to open your mouth as wide as possible, trying to make it very large. In your head read your favorite poem about food, passion, and good appetite. Now close your mouth a little, but still keep it open and move your lower jaw to the right and left to its limits.2. Open your mouth slightly and start pressing your fist on your chin as if you want to close it, while you yourself resist the force of your jaw in order to still open your mouth. Do this with counter-efforts, press your jaw on your fist, and press your fist on the jaw… *we did it with a perfect understanding that the actual exercises need deeper research. These are used purely for prototyping.
And we also do our best to make it accessible and fun:
1) To include EVERYONE to be as diverse as we can: 10 exercises done by 10 women from different races, and different religions!
2) Exercises will be very carefully chosen.
3) Our aim is to guide the user only! No data will be stored anywhere and this will be mentioned at the beginning before launching the experience.
