3 luxury fashion experts in NYC were fed up with the current state of online shopping. 1 Atelier wanted to create an easy, engaging, empowering, and beautiful digital experience that takes the consumer through the creative process of building her own luxury handbag.
We created a digital atelier (workshop) that democratizes the process of designing a luxury handbag with a custom configurator. We also empowered the consumer by educating her on the different bodies and quality materials. By implementing a way to contact the 1 Atelier stylist, we made the consumer feel confident in her purchase.
We worked closely with 1 Atelier throughout the entire product lifecycle:
Customer and market research (JTBD) - We conducted thorough customer research through surveys, live observing, 1 on 1 interviews, and ethnography for similar product experiences. In addition, we identified key personas to help us further validate the initial problem statement.
Low fidelity prototyping and early testing - Rapid prototyping allowed us to do unmoderated user testing to validate early ideas and potential solutions. We also used usertesting.com to run some early scripted tests to identify any potential pain points user might run into throughout the experience.
UI/UX Design - Once our ideas were validated and iterated on, we were ready to start on high fidelity designs. We did further testing with InVision prototypes once we had a working prototype in place.
Implementation & QA - Working very closely with engineering, we decomposed all of the designs into digestible releases for development. After identifying releases, we wrote all stories and acceptance criteria in Jira.
A seamless one page checkout process makes it easy for the user to customize, finalize, and purchase her exclusive handbag and share it with the world by submitting it to the 1 Atelier inspirational gallery or through social media.
One of the many technical challenges with building a digital workshop such as 1 Atelier is what goes on in the backend like every great workshop. Being a small team 1 Atelier needed as much control over the application as possible in the most simple way. For this we decided on building a custom instance of Spree Commerce to not just take advantage of their amazing open source platform but also it allows them the most control and room for flexibility where most other platforms fall short.
On the client side of the application the technical team was challenged with making the amazing designs as fluid and dynamic for growth into the mComemrce space. Because the app experience is tailored for someone to really take their time, a phone application didn’t fit very well into the plan so we settled on making the tablet experience on par with the desktop experience.
Finally, integrations included Braintree for processing and UPS for procurement. However, because each bag was tailor made to the person we had to change the flow from the normal charge and ship once purchased. For this we created a way to delay charging the customer and creating shipping once the product met the high standards of 1 Atelier. Once the bag is complete and ready to ship to the client all a 1 Atelier admin has to do is press one button and the card is charged and the bags is ready to ship.
After 5 strong years, 1 Atelier has made a name for themselves when it comes to customer luxury; receiving write-ups from publications such as Fast Company, Harper’s Bazaar, CNBC, and more.