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Bringing an established brand to life online

How can an already thriving and beloved retail brand with plenty of customers and a lot of local love leverage its online presence to further its reach and evolve its identity?

RESEARCH I BRANDING I WEB DESIGN I E-COMMERCE I B2C

BACKGROUND
Founded in 2003 by a husband and wife team, Artists & Fleas began as a community marketplace for makers, crafters and dealers to come together to sell without having to bear the cost of a pricey retail rental. The market started as a weekends-only destination in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a business model that was simple and novel for the time—vendors apply to rent space to sell their wares alongside other merchants in a funky, branded warehouse featuring music, food and good vibes. After years of organic growth, extended pop-ups, and increased shopper, vendor and press recognition, the business opened a full-time outpost in Chelsea Market, followed by monthly outdoor markets in LA’s downtown Arts District and Venice Beach, and another permanent location in Soho. All throughout, the brand maintained a basic online presence, but the owners were unsure how to approach expansion in the digital space. 

MY ROLE
I joined the existing A&F team as a long-term consultant and quickly embedded myself in their offices among the two founders, market managers, admin staff and other come-and-go contributors. I was tasked with figuring out how to evolve their online presence to support and grow their offline brand, which already had plenty of shoppers and sellers, a strong brand personality, a heart and a soul.

THE CHALLENGE
A&F spent years building its brand organically, leveraging email, a basic website, and growing social media channels to support its offline endeavors. Meanwhile, others in the craft and thrift market space had thriving online presences and e-commerce sites, and while it was clear that A&F needed to be playing deeper in the digital space in order to attract more shoppers and variety of sellers, we needed to figure out where the specific opportunities were for the brand, given that it was operationally and financially unfeasible to just launch a full scale e-commerce sales channel.

THE APPROACH
In order to develop a digital strategy and implement against it, I needed to understand A&F customers and vendors, take a look at competitors, and review what the brand was already doing. So I began with a traditional discovery process, as none had ever been undertaken before.

DISCOVERY
Since the business was already going strong, we had plenty of shoppers and vendors to mine for their impressions, shopping habits, and projected use of an A&F e-commerce site. So I interviewed and surveyed vendors, spoke to shoppers at the different market locations, and analyzed relevant and competitive shopping experiences online to establish benchmarks and uncover trends.

SHOPPERS
I intercepted shoppers as they were exiting the markets to ask about their experience and habits—questions like: What’s most important to you when shopping?

Some common characteristics emerged, leading me to create an aggregate shopper profile, which served as an initial persona sketch.

VENDORS
I took a similar approach to vendors, but given their relationship with the business, I was able to have more in-depth conversations as well as send out a survey.

PERSONA BEHAVIOR MAPPING
I also spent time observing shoppers and how they browsed, what they inquired about, and what they bought. After analyzing all of the qualitative data I’d collected, three types of shoppers emerged, each with slightly different purchase desires, but all valuing the tactile and communal experience of visiting Artists & Fleas. I began to wonder how online shopping could supplement the in-person experience for each.

For instance, tourists are frequently interested in items branded with NYC or Brooklyn, but regulars often visit the market with a specific item type in mind.

I also brainstormed why a shopper might visit the website

USER JOURNEYS

Mapping shopper behaviors and motivations yielded three personas, each with a journey and accompanying A&F digital opportunity.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS + BRAND REVIEW
In tandem, I conducted a review of relevant brand ecosystems to see how each were playing in the digital space. I also surveyed A&F channels.

CREATIVE TEAM BRAINSTORM

The team gathered to review the discovery deck, then broke into smaller groups to further flesh out the shopper personas with thoughts and feelings, influences and behaviors. At the end of the session, we got back together to present , synthesize and identify next steps.

We had everything from “likes the show Broad City” to “has a well-curated apartment” to “swims in public pool.”

INSIGHTS
From the research, I identified four insights to serve as guiding principles as we moved forward with design.

Shoppers are buying the product and the story behind it

Vendors want to sell products and tell their story

A&F shoppers prefer to cultivate versus follow a style

A&F shoppers value discovery and uniqueness

ROUND 1 DELIVERABLES: New Website

To start, the A&F website required an overhaul—specifically it needed logical navigation, a modular structure, tighter copy, and imagery-driven content.

OLD HOMEPAGE

Global nav is too far down the page, disappears on lower level pages, is poorly ordered and labeled, and oddly bundled with event promo.

NEW HOMEPAGE

I established an intuitively-labeled global nav and created a modular homepage to include a flexible promo banner and photo gallery.

In future iterations of the home page, I added an optional video module and a social feed module page bottom.

ROUND 2 DELIVERABLES: Holiday Online Pop-Up Shop

With the website framework up, we had a platform for testing a digital marketplace so we decided to launch an online pop-up shop for the holidays. To save time and money, we kept things in house, from product photography and copy to fulfillment, shipping and returns, all the while tracking performance and workflows. We articulated a clear set of objectives at the outset and were prepared to capture our learnings.

Objectives

  • To initiate momentum around the A&F online sales channel

  • To assess vendor curation, cooperation and bandwidth

  • To test the market during a key shopping season

  • To uncover challenges before embarking on full-scale e-comm site

  • To help shape and refine the digital strategy for the coming year

Learnings

  • Product Breadth: There may not have been enough product selection
    Balance one-of-a-kind feel with maintaining sufficient product inventory

  • Photo Styling: Some items needed to be re-shot
    Inquire with vendors about styling priorities around color and orientation

  • Vendor Inclusion: Some vendors were hurt to be excluded from test pop-up
    Level set about online initiatives, timelines and objectives

  • Shipping Weight: Customer got $40 worth of overnight shipping for $17.99
    Get scale or ask vendors for product weights

  • Promo Codes: Online shopping is competitive, especially during holidays
    Consider incentives for those who shop at markets or receive A&F emails

  • Website Traffic: Press, social media and Google Adwords are not enough to get shoppers to the site
    Consider increasing paid media to drive qualified traffic to the website

ROUND 3 DELIVERABLES: Online Shop

A few months later, we decided to try a phase two e-commerce experience with more products (~200), more vendors, and more product categories. This time, we hired a photographer, but still kept the copywriting, operations and fulfillment in house.

On the product detail page, we captured vendor stories, for example: “Geri, the designer behind Poupette, finds inspiration from her travels around the world.”

ANALYTICS

Throughout my engagement, I presented monthly reports on website traffic: new vs. returning visitors, vendor application views and submissions, blog views, email clickthrough etc. For the holiday online pop-up shop and e-commerce experience, I tracked conversion and product views. Some highlights:

  • Unique visitors and page views were up, likely driven by increased push via Facebook and email; (83% were new visitors)

  • Traffic to the vendor applications page was up, and certain months, applications were up as well

  • Email clickthrough was up, at a healthy 23% open rate and a solid 7% clickthrough rate

  • Social numbers were trending up, though still variable

  • For both the holiday pop-up and larger e-comm trial, conversion was never much more than a quarter of a percent

LEARNINGS
I walked away from this series of projects with a number of takeaways. First, there was standalone value to the deep dive I conducted into shopper preferences, vendor goals, and the evolving competitor landscape. Second, the experimental launch of an MVP e-commerce channel, despite the low conversion, was also of significant value. It revealed that a full scale e-comm channel would demand a number of things: buy-in from most of the vendors, partnership with third-parties to manage inventory, product content, fulfillment, and paid media, and an in-house staff member to manage all of the above. So after some debate about the pursuit if a permanent online sales channel, the client decided against it, largely due to the following realization:
The discovery work uncovered that customers and vendors, echoed by the founding ethos of the business, valued the in-person shopping experience too much to divert attention and resources away towards a robust e-commerce site. Instead, the owners decided to manage their online presence strategically in a way that supported their offline brand through targeted email campaigns, earned and paid media, a well-maintained website, and growing social media channels. Moreover, they would allocate new and existing staff to do so. Often, learning what you don’t want to pursue is more valuable than discovering what you do.

SHOP EXTRAORDINARY ENTERPRISES
Since my work with Artists & Fleas, the brand has flourished, opening pop-up and permanent markets in Atlanta, Berkeley, Marin County, at LaGuardia Airport, and Industry City in Brooklyn. They also launched and acquired two new brands under their parent company, Shop Extraordinary. Regeneration is dedicated to vintage, thrift and upcycled fashion, and Manhattan Vintage is a thrice yearly event bringing together 90+ dealers and collectors from across the decades. While A&F continues to play big nationally across retail, showcase and market spaces, they use their website and social media to support and bolster their offline businesses, as opposed to as a sales channels. To date, they have 250K+ followers across their brands, and the love, like the products, just keeps multiplying.