Koch & Co. Footwear
Co-founder and brand UX designer for a luxury men's footwear company that aims to modernise the way men purchase Goodyear welted shoes.
Goal:
Our company aim was to eliminate the paradox of choice consumers face when shopping for men's dress shoes. We wanted to offer a curated collection of timeless styles that where sustainably made, and leveraged my business partners family heritage in the shoe manufacturing business in India.
My role was to create an online experience that clearly communicated the brand story that both capitalised on the rich heritage of our manufacturing process, as well as providing a modern e-commerce experience.
Value Proposition
'Slow fashion movement’
We continue to be inspired by the notion of 'slow fashion'. By opting for quality materials and timeless designs we hope to slow the rate of fashion consumption, while providing men with beautiful shoes that are made to last.
Artisianal design
Each pair of shoes goes through the hands of 8 different craftsmen, each of them an expert in their field: Cutting, Skiving, Brogue-ing, Stitching, Closing, Lasting, Welting, Finishing. The result is a labour of love that is highly durable and beautifully finished. - “A machine can cut leather, but it cannot differentiate between good leather and damaged leather. Only a human eye is capable of this precision and attention to detail.”
Rich family history
In the newly independent India of the early 1950s, Vishesh Kochher's (CEO) great-grandfather was pivotal in opening up the Indian shoe industry to the rest of the world. Our hope is to bring these 60 years of craftsmanship and heritage to a wider audience and provide people with quality shoes that will last a lifetime.
Consumer Personas
Developing consumer personas helped us understand our core demographic and tailor our brand and UX design towards this audience.
Brand storytelling
Our main value proposition, was having authentic heritage in the Indian shoe manufacturing, with my co-founders family being in the industry for 3 generations, working with skilled artisans that still craft each pair of shoe by hand. Our goal was to take this traditional handcrafted technique, while applying it to a modern shoe last.
Brand design was key in conveying this message. I chose dark navy blue which is masculine and trustworthy, while the gold accent is a subtle nod to our Indian heritage. Our focused view on a single shoe at a time gives it the attention each handcrafted shoe deserves.
Strap line: "Made to Last"
Brand personality: Premium, Contemporary, Minimal, Handcrafted
E-commerce design (UX/UI)
When designing the user experience for the e-commerce site I chose to focus on minimal simplicity that allowed us to guide through our curated collection of shoes. We partnered with fashion bloggers to integrate shop the look functionality while also making use of parallax scrolling and video footage to add a more engaging experience when the consumers learnt about how each shoe is made.
Focus areas included: Highly focused shopping experience that highlighted our curated collection, craftsmanship story pages, a seamless checkout experience and magazine layouts for showcasing our seasonal lookbooks and journal.
Lo-fidelity wireframes
Launch of the first version of the website
Mobile-first approach
Having worked on multiple e-commerce startups before launching this business, I saw over the years of my career how much mobile commerce experiences had been growing in the industry (in most cases as a 50% split with desktop). We decided to take a mobile-first approach for this project, to ensure that our young, professional consumer audience would find it easy to discover, review and purchase our product.
Showing the skills of our craftsmen was an important part of brand story that we designed for with the use of background video footage, parallax scrolling and behind the scenes images.
The e-commerce site was designed and built to be responsive using various breakpoints.
Technical & print materials
Despite being primarily a digital brand, we also required print materials for some purposes (packaging, trade shows, marketing, shoe soles etc.). It was important that the brand expanded seamlessly into these elements, and I decided the best way to do this would be to incorporate similar UI patterns taken from the website. E.g, the main focus on a single shoe vs traditional catalogues that cram multiple products on to a single page spread.
Custom designed pull drawer shoe box in the brand colours.
Product & lifestyle photography
A limited start up capital meant we had to be resourceful with how we photographed our products. As we couldn't afford costly lifestyle shootings, I made use of simple and elegant fixes in photoshop that helped bring the product to life, while remaining affordable. We also partnered with a number of fashion bloggers that we featured in our Koch X Collaborations project.
