The launch of Ooolio.com
From idea to product we only took 3 years (hah), but we gained some valuable learnings along the way — read more to find out!
Our vision for years has been to undo the clutter existing in the fashion world by making one common portal, accessible for everyone. But let’s back up a bit.
Our journey started back in 2017 with my girlfriend pitching an idea almost too irresistible to not follow. She was getting frustrated about whenever she was searching online for any given piece of fashion, she was doing the same process over and over.
Brand.com -> Frontpage -> Category -> Filters -> No result -> Next brand.com -> Frontpage -> Category -> Filters -> No result… You get the gist of it.
However, as a technical hobbyist, my initial thought was that this problem couldn’t be a one-of-a-kind problem. So after some research and interviews with both friends and family, I realized that a lot of people were having the same problems and were spending most of their time browsing and a minor part (around 1% of their time) purchasing the product they needed.
Hence began the adventures of two daring hobbyists to create a whole new fashion experience, only because one girlfriend couldn’t find what she needed: The birth of Ooolio.com
I reached out to a friend of mine who I knew would be helpful to have on board in the project, and we settled for an overall approach by ‘hacking our way to a functioning MVP’. We agree upon the basics and got down to business.
We started out by laying the foundation of the project and went on to make the prototype in Adobe XD to get an idea of the functionality and the scope of the project. We made some different artboards for each of the intended pages; products page, the landing page, the filtering etc. and decided to create a few differing layouts for the landing page, as we couldn’t agree on which one to proceed with.
We chose to configure the project based on a react frontend and started out by using Go for the scrapers — a big mistake it would later seem. We settled on a rather simplistic frontend much inspired by a Google-approach with only a search field and a simple placeholder text. Our prototype was made in Adobe XD, however, we realized that while it was designed in 2017, the design was probably a bit outdated compared to new standards.
However, while realizing the initial design was average, we decided to go for a mere simplistic version as we couldn’t agree on the overall look — as my friend thought that the different styles, boxes and fonts used in the initial design were too confusing for the user and not aligned at all (I didn’t agree!).
While discussing the overall design of the project, we decided to go for a material approach to our site, https://ooolio.com, and we created our next version using only standard components and a super slimmed-down stylesheet, which initially a good idea.
Now we finally agreed that the design was slick, noteworthy and totally up for our mission on decluttering the clutter in the fashion sphere. We had created a landing page as simple as it can be with only the necessary; a logo, a catching statement and a search field — what could go wrong?
So young and yet so naive…
Like any startup, individual, founder and CEO should do, we went to social media to test our proud new design on the focus group we’ve created on Facebook consisting of friends and likeminded souls. We posted a small video of our design with the text:
“We’ve worked day and night to bring you an updated design, so let us know what you think about our new style”
Oh, were we to regret the following days. Initially, we didn’t get any feedback, but after a few days, the discussion in the group started… “It looks like a scam site”, “I have no idea about what the site is intended to do”, “How do I search, the search field is already filled”… and the comments went on and on.
We knew for a fact it was going to be hard, as the fashion marketplace is a crowded space that are driven by a very standardized design approach. In addition, we also knew that our approach was quite different from what was on the market today — Google for searches, Fashion for purchase. And we were trying to combine the two — what monster had we unleashed into the world.
However, after calming down, we took the feedback to us. We knew that our initial thoughts had been debunked, but we also knew that the problem still existed in the market. We thought to ourselves, that we needed some research to back up our designs to ensure that users understood the value proposition as well as how the site worked. We started researching Zara.com, Nelly, Bestseller, H&M and more to understand what the current scenery looked like and understood that we had to figure out to add fashion undertones to our current site to create that visual understanding of what you were committing to when entering https://ooolio.com in your browser.
We re-designed our landing page, added some additional pages to provide basic information about us, the project, contact information to increase user trust and added icons to guide users on how to use the site. We ended up with a still simplistic approach, but with some more content to adhere to the industry trends and this is where the story ends for now.
Our final result:
Currently working a part 2 about the business point of view, as well as a part 3 about the technical details on product scraping and design. Stay tuned!
Ooolio is an online fashion and eCommerce website that gathers your favourite brands, all in one place where you’re able to select and browse more than 1000 premium brands and 150.000 products.
WE LOVE FASHION
Ooolio is an eCommerce universe that places the user experience as the most important element of the business. Ooolio provides the broadest and most relevant selection of apparel items online. It is a platform that differentiates from others by letting users engage and interact with apparels they love. You basically find what you need, and not everything else.
Visit us at https://ooolio.com
