OFFICE

A Digital Flagship for Fashion Forerunners

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Transforming The Digital Experience of a High Street Icon

Awards

Best Fashion eCommerce 2020

Engagement

2019 - 2020

The Challenge

As one of the high street's longest-standing contemporary shoe retailers, OFFICE is a business aware of the need to maintain a level of e-commerce excellence. An awareness which becomes sharper with the knowledge that their digital channels account for over £100M in annual turnover and counting.

Engaged by the brand in 2019, our work laced together strategy, UX, interface design and creative direction to overhaul the digital experience, transforming a flat, frictionless e-commerce site into a digital flagship fully reflective of OFFICE’s stylish repertoire.

In just three months, we crafted a full repositioning of the brand complete with value proposition, core principles, an ambitious mission and a dynamic experience that delivered delight agnostic to device. As well as significantly increasing conversion, traffic and digital turnover at speed – solidifying OFFICE’s place at the forefront of fashion, online and on the high street. 

+163%

DIGITAL TURNOVER GROWTH

+20%

CONVERSION INCREASE

+112%

RISE IN TRAFFIC

Reigniting OFFICE’s Pole Position

The best strategies are those brimming with vision, backed by real insight. As the largest regional chain, OFFICE relies on a consumer base as diverse as the streets they sit on so we cast a wide net for audience insight capture. And a couple of big catches came in. 

Firstly, their most profitable customers are highly profitable. 5x more profitable than 90% of buyers, purchasing 2x more frequently than the next cohort. But, they also have some of the highest return rates. Beyond functional reasons, research identified an emotional one. That the people shopping at OFFICE want to experiment satorially, trying new styles and trends, yet can feel self-conscious about doing so.

Our positioning spun that tension on its head. Highlighting the positive social place for style risktakers, A.K.A OFFICE customers. 

We then traced this positioning to its implications for the business; what they need to be and do to maintain their place at the forefront of footwear fashion. These ranged from continuing to source and then better signpost heat products – a limited edition Nike colourway for example – all the way to leading on emerging values like carbon negative processes and so on.

For those who take risks to get ahead of ‘what everyone is wearing, OFFICE is the forerunner to footwear fashion, enabling you to find emerging styles others will come to envy.
POSITIONING STATEMENT
Designing For Discovery, Search & Style

A key UX challenge was to disassemble the information architecture, creating an improved, data-driven product taxonomy that needed to account for over 50 brand partnerships as well as in-house products in order to boost personalisation, merchandising and discoverability. Mobile optimisation was paramount in our age of scrolling, bolstered by an exponentially improved navigation system and bespoke interface elements.

Our design team overhauled the site’s visual language, refining colour and type choices to better reflect OFFICE’s style-setter positioning. Original art direction was largely led by brands retailing with OFFICE, leading to inconsistency across imagery. Following multiple mood boards and workshops in close collaboration with the in-house creative team, we curated an art direction that would cohesively centre products under the OFFICE brand whilst visually maintaining diversity of stock and the personality of each individual marque. 

Working in agile fashion, the team capitalised on deep technical product management expertise to deliver the project at pace in under three months. OFFICE’s transformed digital flagship went on to win Best Fashion eCommerce at the eCommerce Awards 2020; well-deserved recognition for both MOF creatives and the brilliant team at OFFICE.

We've worked with Matter Of Form for brand and content as well as complex UX, technology delivery and optimisation. They are wonderfully flexible, adapting their team and process to augment into ours perfectly. Overall, they have a perfect mix of left and right brain thinking.
Lorenzo Moretti, CEO of OFFICE 2018-2020