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images/LACE Lingerie Case Study

LACE Lingerie Case Study

The goal for this project was to launch the LACE brand, which includes a newly designed website, email marketing and traditional marketing material. The goal for the brand is to rethink how people see and buy lingerie, as well as change the narrative to make lingerie be a more non-risque part of society.

Role: Art Direction, Front-End Development, Shopify Development, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, Web Design, UX Design

images/LACE Lingerie Case Study
Obie Rifai

About The Brand

LACE Canada - Canada's leading online retailer of sexy lingerie in all sizes. The goal for the brand is to rethink how people see and buy lingerie, as well as change the narrative to make lingerie be a more non-risque part of society. Along with this, LACE’s message to spread a body-positive message by having a plus-sized section to include people of all sizes and not feel alienated when shopping for something as intimate as lingerie. 

Challenge

  • Establish a new brand in an existing industry
  • Design brand image and website
  • By having a wide range of sizes from S - 4X, having a body-positive image was vital to the brand and the goal was to be as inclusive as possible. 

Exploration

  • See what other sites are doing visually and how their brand is represented
  • Look at different e-commerce layout within and outside of the industry
  • Experiment with different styles before picking one to define the brand
  • Establish patterns in e-commerce website and implement the best course of action into the design

Process

I started looking at the mobile version of the site. I analyzed the most important aspects of the page - the header, navigation, and footer. The goal was to create a simple yet intuitive way to use these elements without going against the customer’s default behaviour. Having the side nav on the left, logo in the middle with the search cart and search on the right gives a balance and a familiar placement one would see on a desktop site.

For our main navigation, we wanted to seperate standard lingerie and curvy lingerie. The main objective was to have a place where regardless of your size, you can feel comfortable shopping and have products that you could relate to. By having a curvy section, plus sized customers are able to not only see the selection that would be available in their size easier, but they would also be shown using plus sized models so they would be able to see the products on a body type similar to their own, making it more inclusive.

For the overall site design, I wanted to have a major emphasis on imagery since lingerie, and shopping for clothing in general, is a very visual activity. Having strong banner images as well as showing a variety of models helped with the overall design of the site, as well as helping the brand establish their own identity in the crowded market. I wanted the direction to have more of a higher class fashion site as opposed to a bargain bin look so that it would help customers trust the brand more as well as help see the product in more of a premium light, but at affordable prices.

LACE Mobile Designs LACE Desktop Designs

Development

In Mid 2018, we switched our ecommerce platform from Magento to Shopify. I was responsible for re-coding the site to fit Shopify’s platform using HTML,CSS,JS and Shopify’s scripting language Liquid. By doing this we needed a lot of additional information for our products like specifications, whether it was discontinued or not, if there were videos associated with the product, complete this look for products that weren’t sold in sets, and more. By using all the tools that we had at our disposal with minimal use of 3rd party apps, we successfully launched on Shopify with little problems and made it a seamless transition for our customers.

Marketing

Our main objective for our email marketing campaigns was to promote new collections while keeping our customers informed about current and future fashion trends. It was also important that our newsletters have the same branding and messaging as our site, by including body positive imagery, while incorporating styles and sales. Emails like these went out 4 days a week to keep our customers informed of new styles, as well as sales that we are currently offering.

We also had to develop a workflow that would onboard new customers to our email marketing campaign as well as set up automated campaigns for Browse Recovery, Cart Recovery as well as Post Purchase series. I was tasked to create a workflow to manage the customer journey as well as implement the campaigns in Bronto, which was our email service.

LACE Customer Journey LACE Email Designs

For our LACE Catalogues, the objective was to create a fashion magazine style catalogue to showcase new and existing collections to either go direct to mail or in orders that were placed on the website. We wanted the catalogues to more resemble fashion magazines with more of an emphasis on editorial images while incorporating the sales aspects of a normal sales catalogue. We also wanted to have theme pages such as great gift ideas, bridal sections, and influencer pages to give our customers other ways of looking at our products from an non-intimate way. 

LACE Catalog Designs LACE Stationary Designs

Summary

What was done

  • Establish a brand and style for LACE
  • Launch of website
  • Launch of email marketing
  • Create a direct to mail booklet
  • Create a yearly catalog of new products and collections to go out with orders
  • Create Business cards, postcards to go into orders

Outcome

Overall, the outcome of this project was a success. We successfully launched LACE in November 2015 and established its own look and feel in a crowded industry. By having a curvy site within the main one, we made it a safe and body-positive place for plus sized customers to purchase lingerie while giving them options to see products that are more relatable to them. 

Role: Art Direction, Design, Front-End Development, Shopify Development, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Graphic Design, Web Design

LACE Website Designs LACE Stationary Designs