Rebranding

The problem with Cristelle & Co. was lack of brand vision and therefore mixed messages communicating the brand image, several years of poor financial performance and declining collection size. The target segment was too wide, something for everyone, that caused it to be for no-one. I felt we needed to re-create the brand by carving out the real customer and define her lifestyle, and re-define the brand vision.

We wanted to focus in creating beautiful contemporary women’s brand, with effortless & commercially appealing style, coherent and integrable collection.

Branding, Customer Research, Concept Design, Fashion Design, Iterative Product Development

Credits to my team: Matja Komu, Miia Rautemaa, Saija Lappalainen 

Photoshop, Illustrator, Pen&Paper, Excel, Powerpoint

Cristelle & Co. is a private brand of Stockmann department stores, Scandinavia's biggest department store based in Helsinki Finland. I was brought in as a fashion designer to re-create the troubled contemporary fashion brand, to achieve the right brand image and enable accelerated sales.

We were given ambitious business goals for the re-launch from the company leadership. We brainstormed on initial ideas and after several rounds of presentation - improvement loops, broke them down into Brand Strategies and seasonal Buying Area Strategic Plans, that were the driving idea behind the development process. I created the visual parts for these strategies, and was responsible of the creative direction of the brand.

I needed to understand who our customers were, so I conducted investigative research on the target group. I used personas-type segmentation to illustrate who I’m designing for, to keep the customer front and center on my design process and keep my designs on track. Clearly defining the target personas helped the whole international team and stakeholders understand the needs and motivations of our customers and improve our strategic targeting.

As an afterthought after learning more about UX design, we and the whole fashion industry would benefit greatly on more thorough customer research, deeper analysis on personas, task and journey maps.

The process in fashion design is same as UX design in many ways. It starts with ideation and moodboarding, defining business goals, and analyzing learnings and feedback from previous products. After initial design meetings with team, it continues with sketching and iterative prototyping, testing the products at each step and improving the design until the MVP is reached, and it's ready to go to production. At each step designs are validated with stakeholders, to keep them included and on track. 

Iterative process continues with testing and gathering feedback from the launched products, until new development cycle starts again. As a designer, I had continually 3 different development cycles actively on my table - the one I was ideating, one on development and one launched. 

Prototypes were tested multiple times throughout the development cycle. Usually testing was within team members because of company confidentiality policies. 

The main points to test were:

1. Usability, is the fitting what was intended.

2. Functionality, are all elements functional for the purpose.

3. 3D silhouette, does it have the right movement and shape as intended.

4. The whole, can the items be matched together to make looks.

5. Inspiration, is it on-trend and does the product bring delight.

First prototype is always tested with the most important usability errors, that are imperative to get fixed. Following prototypes are then confirming the issues from the previous round were improved and tested for less severe issues. Iterating each step of the way, making changes to the prototypes according the testing, we finally came up with ready design for development. 

I created visual design concept around Cristelle & Co. reflecting the brands new minimalist aesthetics. I created Style Guides and overall Visual Brand Identity for Cristelle & Co. to keep things consistent and achieve the desired aesthetic of the brand across the board. 

I also standardized the labeling instructions by providing Label Guidelines that helped bring clarity and consistency with working with label instructions for vendors and team.

I exported the assets and packaged the deliverables for the development, keeping the files organized as I work, so anyone teaming up with me can easily find files and continue where I left off.

I kept the timelines and finished the branding on time for the launch date of fall 2014. The process of recreating the brand and developing the collection took a year, which is usually the time to develop a collection alone without the brand development.

We received positive feedback across the board and managed to make a turnaround with fall 2014 collection, resulting in re-launch with 42% sales growth in first 2 months. We also exceeded the long-term financial goals by resulting in 10% growth on top of growth despite the challenging and declining markets.

New brand identity was praised for the clear vision and appealing, commercial & coherent collection. Style guides resulted in more coherent brand marketing, which helped the customer understand the brand better, and feel connected to it.

I managed to create solid portfolio of hot items that sold out in just few days, and introduced new strategic wardrobe classics that proved to generate steady growth from season to season.