B-Reel

Carolina Herrera's
Digital Ecosystem

Fashion & Beauty / Nominee
B-Reel

Fashion & Beauty

"To help write the next chapter and speak to an emerging group of luxury customers, we had to rethink how the brand connects and moves with modern culture." B-Reel
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Q: Can you describe your project and the concept behind it? A: For 40+ years, Carolina Herrera has maintained its classic, elegant reputation as a strong female-led luxury brand. To help write the next chapter and speak to an emerging group of luxury customers, we had to rethink how the brand connects and moves with modern culture. We created a vision for the brand, kickstarting their first direct-to-consumer experience and rethinking their entire digital ecosystem, ensuring fidelity across every touchpoint.
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Q: Tell us about your initial moodboard, wireframe, or prototype. How did things change throughout the process? A: Most of the initial ideas we had for the site became reality. We changed the original structure a lot and created a better base for the project, avoiding obsolete standards and taking advantage of new open framework technologies. Our concept to create a content-to-sales website with immersive modules and experiential personalized features was strong. From the mood boards to final executions we made several changes to simplify the page designs.
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Q: What influenced your chosen technical approach, and how did it go beyond past methods? A: With so many emerging beauty and fashion brands, we needed to elevate the brand experience. One of the platform's marquee launch features was a makeup configurator allowing customers to customize and purchase the brand's iconic lipsticks and compacts. Using an AR filter, directly from your computer camera, users can explore anything from texture and shade while customizing caps and cases, including exterior flourishes like tassels and charms

When did you experience a breakthrough or an "a-ha" moment during this project?

When we talk about fluid UI experiences, social media is on the top of the list. So instead of drawing inspiration from existing successful e-commerce UX flows, we decided to create consistent visual dialogue between social media and e-commerce in relation to image and video formatting. This allowed for a more fluid and intuitive mobile experience.

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Q: What web technologies, tools, and resources did you use to develop this? A: We used NuxtJS on the FE side to generate our pages, following the Jamstack architecture. With this we solved two important pain points: SEO and performance. Good positioning was important for the brand, and by generating all the pages statically, we could cache them and serve it through a CDN, improving load and response times. We developed tools using WebGL & AR FaceTracking to allow users to configure unique makeup products and try them on.

Q: How did you balance your own creative ideas and technical capabilities with a fair representation of the client’s brand? A: From the start we were incredibly ambitious for wanting to create an immersive sales experience. At first we encountered some performance issues, but in honing our skills as a product team we were able to improve the platform each day, quickly making small improvements from the MVP to the final launch. In the end, we were able to create an extremely responsive site in line with the brand's expectations for showcasing and selling their products.

Q: How did the final product meet or exceed your expectations? A: Before the launch, the majority of Carolina Herrera’s worldwide business was B2B. The e-commerce platform was the first attempt to bring the entire brand to life for a B2C experience. This exceeded all of our expectations by quickly becoming one of the most relevant sales tools for the brand and the number one makeup category e-commerce platform worldwide. This became an extremely valuable platform to develop cohesive content to drive sales.

Q: Why is this an exciting time to create new digital experiences? How does your team fit into this? A: There has been a lot of change in the luxury e-commerce business over the past few years. It has become more experiential, and much more tactile, and this excites our team immensely. Our team is a mix of creative coders, developers, art directors and designers that work collectively to create new experiences and improve this product everyday.