Statements
We were approached Bea Mocci, founder and director of Statements, who had the ultimate goal of creating a single search platform for fashion brands who are looking to improve the planet and improve the working conditions of the people who make our clothing.
The main challenge was in designing a website that was not only functional and effective for the front-end user, but also for the client on the back-end, so that thousands of products from hundreds of different websites could be easily imported and managed totally hassle-free.
- Client : Statements
- Website : statementsstore.com
- Issues : Sustainability, Worker's Rights, Fashion
- Services Offered : Website Design, Website Development, Consulting
Designing the Logo
When we were first approached to build the Statements website, the working name at the time was 'Style Vane' and they didn't have a logo. The budget for the logo was very limited, so to keep costs down we offered a mix of mostly wordmark logos relying more on minimalistic shapes and symbols to convey the idea of a weather vane.
With a later name change to Statements, there was less time to focus on redesigning a new logo, but we borrowed and expanded upon the ideas formed here.
Initial Ideas
In the initial design stages we were focussing mostly on establishing the aesthetic direction that Bea wanted to take.
We knew the design had to be modern and make reference to existing cues from the fashion world, so we wanted to see which elements we could take in a more unconventional direction, drawing attention to how Statements was more than just another fashion website.
Design Progression
During the initial design phase, we explored the potential implementation of a variety of different modules, all with different functions. In doing so, we realised that less was more; rather than offer all of these options to the user, which could have distracted from the end goal, we concentrated on simplification in the second phase, with all key user journeys driving people to the clothes they wanted to find as quickly as possible.
In the UX of the second iteration we therefore prioritised curated clothing collections, drawing more attention to the "Brand Showcase" section as a selling point for potential brand partnerships.
After finalising the UX, we wanted to strip everything back and implement a bold colour scheme in key areas of the site only, so that when it is used the impact is that much greater.
Building a Simple, but Powerful Back-End
The core functionality of the site from the client's perspective was the ability to easily, and without any prior tech knowledge, bring in products from hundreds of different ethical fashion websites across the world and uniformly display them to the end user in way that is both easily searchable and categorisable.
To build this, we had to design a back-end that enabled the client to choose any fashion ecommerce website, scrape through all the products on that site and then retrieve all the necessary information about each of those products so they could be sorted and displayed on the front-end of Statements.
The information scraped here was pushed into a custom API which we used to generate products, and then automatically sort them by category and gender. By designing the process of adding items to be as automated as possible for the client, they can spend more time focussed on content creation and curation rather than fiddly technical details.
