A luxurious look for a fashion startup
Members-only fashion club Vivrelle approached us with a fresh idea and the opportunity to design a product, brand, and experience from the ground up. From brand strategy to design and web development, we helped Vivrelle bring their business idea to life.
- Services
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Brand, Design, Development, Analytics, Optimization, Strategy, and UX
- Industry
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Fashion
Ask
Create a New Product From the Ground Up
When they approached us, the Vivrelle team presented us with a mere business concept. We were tasked with taking that unique concept and making it real in the form of a product, a brand, a visual identity, an online storefront, and a complete customer experience solution that conforms to their business model. We were handed a pitch deck and not much more, and were asked to bring the Vivrelle business online in time for New York Fashion Week.
Strategic Approach
Establish a Brand Focused on “NOwnership” in the Luxury Accessories Market
Vivrelle came to us with a clear objective: disrupt the women’s luxury accessories market around the concept of “NOwnership.” The goal of the project was to build an exclusive, members-only experience that requires consumers to apply to join, ensuring that Vivrelle could both manage demand and still generate buzz among their target market.
In the new millennial economy, many consumers are already familiar with the NOwnership model for other industries, such as ride-sharing and home-sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb. Vivrelle would provide the opportunity to those who wanted to experience luxury accessories without necessarily forking over a significant amount of money to buy them outright (the majority of goods that you can borrow with Vivrelle retail for over $5,000). What would otherwise be a major purchase for someone can instead arrive at their doorstep in a matter of days, with monthly subscription fees under $100. Vivrelle wanted to blow up this market, and hired us to help them do it.
Execution
Build a Digital Platform to Run a Business
Like any product we work on, we had a multitude of ideas and goals for the platform, each with tradeoffs on the benefit to customers compared to level of effort. We worked in a collaborative format with the Vivrelle team to ideate on those features, discuss tradeoffs, and build a plan for an MVP launch, with an additional backlog of items to address after the initial go-live.
One of the most important initial features for the launch was managing the expected influx of membership applications. Vivrelle wanted to make a splash and hit the ground running, but wouldn't necessarily be able to service thousands of members on day one. We built a system to allow people to apply for membership, enter a queue to be reviewed by the fashion experts at Vivrelle, and then notified if and when their application was accepted. The CMS platform allowed for reviewing these applications quickly and new member accounts were set up at the click of a button, allowing Vivrelle to focus on growing their brand.
The business is entirely run from the web platform we built. We leveraged Craft CMS for the project, which allowed us to use some out of the box features that Craft is great for while being extremely flexible to accommodate custom development for Vivrelle's unique NOwnership business model. All membership management, order fulfillment, customer service, and product inventory tracking is managed in Craft CMS. Subscription payment and individual orders are handled via secure credit card processing, shipping notifications and tracking numbers are set up via a third-party logistics service the website integrates with, and their visitor and customer data is managed via a custom CRM integration we built for Vivrelle. We designed and built an entire business platform and product, not just a website.
The platform also serves as the hub of their marketing and promotion efforts, and we built several ways for the Vivrelle team to connect with influencers and the fashion world. The “Influencer’s Closet” section of the site allows influencers to be a part of the platform, promoting their own brands and bringing Vivrelle to a wider audience. Many of these influencers have upwards of 100,000 followers (some many more) and so act as a significant driver for traffic and memberships through social media channels. Membership to Vivrelle includes discounts to over a dozen other services and products that Vivrelle's typical member would be interested in, further incentivizing people to sign up for a paid membership.
Our contributions extended beyond digital, as we created the entire brand system and visual identity to define the look, feel, and tone of who Vivrelle wanted to be. We also designed brand collateral such as packaging and stationery and determined the photography style. We completed the design vision by art directing a Vivrelle photoshoot in order to curate the perfect shots for the new site. The result is a cohesive brand and web platform that serves as the foundation of what Virelle sought to become.
