The sky is the limit

When you want to expand your target audience as a successful company, you need a grip on your product and your identity. Unc Inc conducted analysis and designed a new platform for PME Legends, part of fashion company Just Brands, in a series of intensive flights.

Central to the expansion was the desire to make the website and web shop one well-cooperating digital point of contact for all old and new customers. Unc Inc analyzed the different target groups and tailored a specific design to them. This design was converted into a fully functional product by Flirt Creativity.

At Unc Inc, while designing our products, we put the end user at the center - who is going to use the web shop and why? Because PME Legend wants to keep an existing market and enter a new one, two different target groups have to be taken into account.

To get this difference clear, we use personas: Persona one is the regular customer, who wants to buy clothing directly (online) and where conversion increase through ease of use is key. Persona two is a potential customer, who you mainly want to introduce to the brand. Here, the physical store is important.

To meet the needs of both audiences, it is essential that the web shop be accessible and flexible. With this as a starting point, we began the design.

For the familiar user it should be easy to get directly to the products, while new customers should have the opportunity to explore collections. And to also allow this target audience to explore the products beyond the digital, the nearest physical stores are shown.

In addition, it had to be easy for PME Legend's content management team to adjust campaigns and products to reflect new collections, and to spread notifications of these changes via social media.

PME Legend has a strong identity that needed to be more prominent on the new website. Therefore, within the new style, it was decided to break up these core pieces into manageable parts and spread them throughout the website. With the help of these "snippets" and use of photography, the user comes into direct contact with the identity of the brand, and this identity is linked to the products.

Important for an e-commerce website is that the products are well displayed. The old PME Legend website had a dark theme and heavy use of gray. Since many of the products are also dark in color, they did not stand out within the old design. The most important thing for an e-commerce website is to have an attractive (read: balanced) presentation of the product.

However, switching from a dark to an all-white theme was not seen as an option, as the recognizable style is an important component to the brand's identity. This presented an interesting dilemma. How do we create a subtle transition between the old style and the new style that does justice to both the identity and the products?

Ultimately, a single supported color of gray was chosen, black as the base color and the addition of white blocks. This results in a strong and cohesive visual style that is recognizable, but also feels fresh and new.

In the 2 months before delivery, we met several times with PME Legend and Flirt Creativity to work out the concepts behind the web shop in a series of intensive sessions, turn these concepts into a new design, and develop this design into a fully functional end product.

We are proud to have successfully leveraged the expertise of our team to help realize PME Legend's wishes. We used our experience in e-commerce conversion, persona development and visual cohesion in an engaged collaboration that went beyond the design phase. We were involved in the development and launch, and will continue to offer support in the phases that follow.