In partnership with Cornell Tech, I was provided the unique opportunity to collaborate with retail giant UNIQLO and create a digital product in response to their real life challenge of customer acquisition amongst US audiences. Within my team were some of the top law, MBA, and data scientist students in the country. We developed a sustainable marketplace to aid acquisition strategies for the US’s ethical consumers. I worked as a UX researcher and UI designer to build our prototype from start to finish.
UNQILO is one of the most successful clothing retailers in the world. While it has been able to acquire customers in cities like Tokyo, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Singapore, it still has a way to go when it comes to dazzling US consumers. UNIQLO's US CEO, Hiroshi Taki, explained to us that UNIQLO markets itself as a "lifewear" brand, as it believes its clothing is made to improve customers' lives. The improvements include everything from the quality of the fabric to attention to detail, function, and fit. They also include social causes that impact customers, such as climate change and the philanthropy that UNIQLO supports. The brand makes a contribution to the world beyond simply creating outfits. So why can't US consumers see its value? It was our job to find out.
We started by jumping into competitive research, reading articles as well as academic papers about the industry, the brand, and UNIQLO’s direct competitors. After weeks of reading and sipping tea until midnight, it was time for us to go outside and speak to some real people.
We understand that “value” means different things to different people, so we asked 20 US consumers what it meant to them.
During our ideation phase we went through multiple agile sprints to ideate a digital product we could build to solve UNIQLO's problem. We used value creation and built business models to analyze the success of our potential product. From there we started to look at user personas and sketches as we slowly zoomed in on our solutions.
I'm going to be honest: our first solution to UNIQLO's HMW was not the final product that you see at the end of this page. Our first idea was to create a digital product that would act as a marketplace and a rewards program as users shopped and learned about the brand values that UNIQLO and other brands like it held. After careful consideration and a ton of ugly sketches, we had the realization that this wouldn't have much traction to a consumer audience.
Did you know it takes over 7,000 gallons of water to make a single pair of jeans? I didn't. But US consumers are aware of the environmental impacts of the fashion industry. At UNIQLO, every pair of jeans is sustainably made with only a teacup of water. During our exploratory interviews, customers and marketing professionals spoke about the importance of sustainability in the current retail market. More specifically how customers discover brands online, specifically on e-commerce platforms like Amazon and department stores like Nordstrom. So we thought to ourselves, we have to reframe the HMW question to speak to this specific brand value.
Fashion industry is the chief culprit of climate change, and consumers are calling for a more sustainable industry. With collections of sustainable products, Onecity is a fashion marketplace that aims to reduce environmental impact and builds a customized waste profile for each customer.
We didn't have much time to build our prototype due to our delayed pivot, so we had to focus on what we thought would be crucial for a minimum viable product (MVP). After some more competitive analysis research, we decided to keep a familiar e-commerce format that users would see on other apps but add in a sustainability profile to showcase the impact a shopper could track.
It's safe to say we learned a lot from working on this project and are very thankful for UNIQLO's part in it. There were definitely road bumps along the way, some being our pivot and others being the difficult balance of working cross functionally with a team of people coming from different disciplines. Together we grew and learned to trust in each other to make game time decisions. We did steer away from UNIQLO's original HMW question, but we were advised that we could do this as long as our solution related to the original HMW. We believe that UNIQLO partnering with Onecity and selling their products there would make them more discoverable for consumers in the US who take sustainability seriously.
From a product design perspective, I really wish I had the time to test the mid and high-fidelity version of Onecity. The product was really made on a time crunch with our pivot and we had only a week or so to build the actual prototype. In the future, I'd do more user interviews and even change some of the UI to make the sustainability product info stand out more. Still, I'm very happy with how the product turned out and my experience with my team.
