case Study:
Aerosoles
Re-brand
Helping Aerosoles go from drab to fab.
The designer, manufacturer and retailer of women's footwear products based in New York needed a long overdue refresh.
Overview
When the Aerosoles ecommerce website needed a facelift, things didn't just get prettier. they got easier, faster, friendlier and more engaging. We took a brand considered comfort shoes for middle-aged women, put it on the runway and attracted a new demographic while still serving its core.
+56%
Conversion Rate
down 196%
Abandoned Carts
up 225%
Rewards Program Subscriptions
+48%
Brand Perception
The Challenge
To put it bluntly, aerosoles.com wasn't just no fun to look at, it was a chore to use. Drab colors and a decidedly vertical aspect made it feel constrained. Four levels of text navigation, all in different styles, a poorly located search box and some odd layout choices, and you can see why a major overhaul was needed.
The second challenge to overcome was how we engaged the user. Aerosoles primary demographic was women aged 45- 70, and not very tech savvy. We needed a visual design that appealed to her sensibilities and interactions that were simple & streamlined.
Lastly, we wanted the new design to appeal to a younger, more fashion-forward customer.
The Approach
We decided to forget Aerosoles had an existing website, and asked ourselves what would we do if we were starting from zero? We surveyed thousands of users, set up "browsing sessions" in retail stores and researched dozens of industry whitepapers and platform providers.
We then analyzed the customer research to create a universal "She/Her" and asked what techniques and technologies would solve for the majority of pain-points we discovered.
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Then we dug in and re-imagined everything from the logo to landing pages to product listings and checkout.
The Solution
Before tackling the visual design, we made wholesale changes to the core capabilities of the site. We implemented best practices like ratings and reviews, and faceted search.
We embraced emerging interaction methods such as search as navigation and dynamically updating thumbnails. We even pioneered a few "next-practices" we called enhanced quick view and zer0-refresh. We also made the experience responsive which was sorely lacking in the previous version.
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Then the fun began. We redesigned everything. The logo was tweaked to better represent the brand. The navigation was simplified from 9 categories to 5. We lightened the weight of the visual style and used more lifestyle imagery in lieu of product shots. Our proprietary technologies were highlighted to differentiate the brand, and most importantly, we streamlined the checkout process from a 4-page monstrosity to a single-page guided form.
The Results
We ended up with not just a beautiful site that better reflected both the brand and the customer, but one that vastly improved every key ecommerce metric. Conversions increased dramatically. Abandoned carts went down and many were recovered through new methods we implemented. Items-per-order went up almost a full unit as a result of zer0-refresh. Enhanced quick view keeping users on search results and product listing pages, and rewards program and mailing list subscriptions grew substantially.
Wireframes
