mindful consumption

AWEAR is a digital wardrobe assistant designed to counter the adverse environmental effects of fast fashion. By maintaining a comprehensive inventory of your clothes, while linking the contents of closets belonging to your friends, it encourages consumers to first consider if they actually need something new. As a tradable commodity, underutilized clothes gain value which extends their life, saving them from the landfill.

The app’s ultimate goal is to broaden the notion of shopping to include acquiring access to clothes that are not new, but new to you. AWEAR serves the fashion conscious desire to rock fresh looks on social media, without additional consumption.

role

My focus is on user research, product design and client pitch.

RESEARCH

Through one-on-one interviews, I look to gain empathy with fashion consumers to uncover unmet needs and areas of friction. Analyzing the interview data helps to identify insights from which we create a problem statement.

DESIGN

The concept is not mine, but I am responsible for the product name which alludes to the higher purpose of raising consumer awareness. I also participate in brainstorming sessions to explore potential functionalities, and provided input on the UI and and page flow developed by my teammates.

PITCH

Leaning into my background in marketing, and incorporating storytelling techniques, I write and direct the client pitch in the format of a 1950s detective series. In this unique and memorable format, old school detectives attempt to solve the crime of fashion waste. This allows us to cleverly illustrate all of AWEAR’s functionality, while addressing the age old dilemma of “I’ve got nothing to wear”. Using a non-traditional format set our product apart from all the typical powerpoint presentations, lavishing laughter and praise from our client.

 TOOLS

 Adobe XD, Marvel POP, Mural, Facebook ads, Wix, Ping Pong, Otter

project

CLIENT

PVH (formerly Phillips-Van Heusen) traces its humble beginnings to 1881 as a shirtmaker for coal miners. Over a century later, they have grown to own 1000 factories and opperate 6000 retail locations, generating $7 billion in revenue. While they are best known for global brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, IZOD, Geoffrey Beene and Warners, less well known is that they are on Barron’s list of the 100 most sustainable companies.

As a major force in the fashion industry, they are now seeking to leverage their influence to address wasteful practices within their industry. To have a greater impact, they wish to devise solutions that might promote changes in consumer behavior extending beyond their customer base. We propose a white label solution that can be co-opted by other major fashion brands to achieve far greater impact.

PROBLEM

Fashion overconsumption is highly detrimental to the environment. Fueled by social media which has greatly accelerated the fashion cycle, clothes lose value faster than ever. For the young and fashionable, being seen in the same outfit twice is viewed as a major fashion faux pas. As a result, image conscious shoppers flock to fast-fashion merchants like Boohoo and Pretty Little Things. The rise of cheap fashion which promotes a disposable fashion culture benefits the fashion industry, which doubled production in just 2 decades. Today’s consumers purchase 60% more clothing, but keep them half as long as they did in the year 2000. The UN estimates that 92 million tons of textiles are wasted annually, a loss valued at $500 billion.

BRIEF

We are asked to redesign & innovate the way users consume and access clothes so that the product life is extended or even closed (circular).

process

We employ the British Design Council’s double diamond model, which supports the user centric principles of design thinking. Matching diamonds divide the design process into 4 stages: discover, define, develop and deliver. This model guides us from validating our initial premise to defining a problem for which we ultimately solve through incremental refinements, culminating in the development and implementation of a product or service.

The first diamond addresses what, using research and analyses to gain insight into the problem space, while the second determines how through ideation, prototyping and testing.

Admittedly, this simple diagram oversimplifies a more complex and sometimes non-linear design process. In practice, user centric design is achieved through an iterative process of prototyping, testing and refining, so that the journey is circular. Still, this model serves as a useful guide of the general direction.

stage 1. discover

Discovery is comprised of desk research and one-on-one interviews to gain empathy with users.

Lacking fashion industry experience, our team relies on secondary research to grasp the problem space from both the vantage point of consumers and industry. Sources includes articles, academic papers and online media to quickly familiarize ourselves with current fashion trends, and to gain situational awareness that helps us gauge where the industry is heading.

 observations

 INDUSTRY

• Fashion is one of the world’s worst sources of pollution, responsible for 20% of wastewater and 10% of carbon emissions worldwide.

• Wasteful production practices cause resource scarcity, ultimately reducing long-term profitability.

•  High volume brands such as Zara and H&M launch between 12-24 collections in a single year.

• The fashion industry tends to be highly secretive, and therefore, not prone to collaboration.

• The pandemic temporarily slowed fashion’s relentless pace, due to supply chain problems.

  INSIGHT

  Adoption of sustainable practices is costly, and could render an individual company noncompetitive, so a collaborative effort is necessary to share the cost of transition.

CONSUMER

• The primary consumers of fast fashion are young and female.

• Today’s taste-makers are social media influencers that promoting extreme levels of consumption.

• A rise in anti-consumerism has altered consumer expectations to emphasize sustainability.

•  Younger consumers are more prone to seek out brands that align with their beliefs.

• There is a shift towards supporting smaller, independent and local designers.  

• The rise of distance work has reduced demand for workplace fashion.

  INSIGHT

  Generation Z and Millennials are heavy consumers while at the same time, keenly aware of climate awareness. Maintaining conflicting practices creates an internal psychologcal conflict known as cognitive dissonance.

research

PRIMARY RESEARCH

To understand the fashion consumer’s experience, we address the source by launching an anonymous online survey in an effort to understand the importance of fashion, shopping habits and the challenges of shopping sustainably. While questionnaires cannot provide great depth, they offer a quick method to reach a wide audience. This exercise also served as a pretotyping exercise, which is to say a way to validate signifcant interest in our topic before expending substantial time or energy. An enthusiastic response to our questionnaire confirmed sufficient interest on the part of consumers, who are predominantly young females, confirming that they present our archetypal user.

We must now delve deeper to gain empathy, as we look to uncover unmet needs and frustrations, that provide opportunities to solve. This is accomplished through a series of one-on-one interviews with fashion consumers.

INTERVIEW TOOLS

A research guide with scripted questions and set time limits is developed to maintain uniformity between interviews. Ping pong is an online research tool that secures interview candidates within our target group. Otter records and transcribes, eliminating the need to take notes and allowing us to replay recorded sessions to uncover missed details. Interview findings are organized into a download matrix which helps in extracting key points from large quantities of interview data. Working from distance, our team relied on zoom for video conferencing, and mural virtual whiteboard whose major advantage over physical post-it notes which eventually fall off or get discarded when another team need the wall, is that they are permanently saved, so they can be revisited and amended as needed.

user interviews

In one-on-one interviews with 6 female consumers, we asked:

• How often do you shop for clothes?

• What is clothing’s main purpose?

• How important is being stylish?

• What do you do with unwanted clothes?

 WANTS & NEEDS

“Being stylish to me is like really really important, possibly unhealthily important”
Rachel, 23

“To me, I think appearance and style is definitely more important than practicality”
Georgia, 21

“I love swapping clothes with my friends especially for special occasions”
Sam, 28

"My style underlines my personality, my feelings and gives me a good mood”
Sarah, 25

 CHALLENGES & FRUSTRATIONS

“If it’s too expensive then I’ll be like, never mind. So, sustainable shopping isn’t in my budget range”
Georgia, 21

 “I find it so hard to sort through which brands are sustainable. It needs to be more transparent”
Jazmine, 23

“Sometimes I purchase things knowing it is probably unethically sourced, but I justify that because I do so much good, so then its okay”
Rachel, 23

“Sustainable brands are difficult to trace and comprehend”
Crystal, 29

 TAKEAWAYS

• Inasmuch as consumer demand drives the fashion industry, the root causes of overconsumption must be addressed in order to reimagine more sustainable fashion practices,

• Overconsumption is inextricably tied to overproduction, and cannot be expected to decline when aggressive producers launch new lines bi-monthly. An industry-wide effort to limit production is necessary to slow the relentless consumption of fashion.

• Limited finances causes young shopper’s to value price over environmental concerns, raising the question: how might fashion consumers adopt sustainable practices within a limited budget?

stage 2. define

Whereas the define stage is an effort to expand our knowledge base, the define stage is a convergent effort, where we look to solidify the knowledge acquired, in order to cristalize it into a single actionable direction.

synthesis

AFFINITY MAPPING

Affinity mapping is a tool used to synthesize great amounts of research data, allowing researchers to extract meaning by drawing out a few valuable insights. These help us to identify and frame a particular user issue for which to solve. Feedback from user interviews is transferred to real or virtual post-it notes, each containing a single data point. Once they are posted on a wall, we sort them based on similarities which identifies recurring themes. A cluster of similar ideas submitted by multiple interviewees alert us to common issues with addressing, but outliers can also be useful in identifying less frequent but interesting problems. Through synthesis, we identify several actionable insights.

KEY INSIGHTS

IDENTITY FORMING
Clothing is perceived as an integral part of one’s personality. What we wear defines us.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
Even members of sustainability minded generations love to shop. These conflicting sensabilities produce a state of psychological discomfort.

SWAP MEET
Sharing clothes is a time honored tradition amongst friends.

OPPORTUNITY SELECTION

User research uncovers not one, but a wide variety of opportunity areas that could be pursued, so we must employ a distilling process to filter down to a single vexing problem. Plotting potential opportunities on a scale from narrow to broad, helps to identify which offer the greatest potential.

FRAMING THE PROBLEM

We call attention to a paradox emerging from feedback from young female users. Despite a heightened concern for the environment, fast-fashion is valued as a means of defining their personality.

Young consumers prioritize personal identity and self-image over sustainability.

stage 3. develop

The articulation of a particular problem sets the design challenge, ushering in the creation stages found in the second diamond. Like the other diamond, the first half is divergent, where ideation is used to generate a volume of ideas, while the second is convergent, where we choose a particular solutions.

Examples of ideation methods include various brainstorming techniques including mind mapping and crazy 8s.

ideation

Posing our initial concepts as questions allows us to envision their potential as possible solutions.

• How might we encourage ethical consumption through a change of mindset?

• How might we make shopping for sustainable clothing low involvement?

• How might we facilitate sustainable shopping decisions that meet self-image and values?

• How might we prolong the life of garments so that they achieve greater utility?

The solution tree is a visual display of opportunities, making it easy to differentiate areas of promise. The tree reminds designers to trace solutions backwards prior to development, to make sure that solutions proposed are on track to solve for the stated problem.

We opted for a direction that satisfies several needs identified.

1. Requires low involvement

2. Builds coherence between self-image and values

3. Addresses cognitive dissonance

PERSONAS

Empathic solutions are based on user input. While these are fictitious characters and stock images, the wants and needs are drawn from research, so that designers can be easily reminded of what user needs and frustrations. The purpose of personas is to recall user feedback when designing a solution.

We wanted our app to deliver utility to different types of users. Ellen represents a younger user that has not yet found their way in the workforce or who has a low wage positions and therefore highly budget conscious. Claire represents a somewhat older user who is more financially independent, whose choices are not entirely based on cost.

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

Prior to designing our own wardrobe assistant, we performed analysis of several of the better rated apps: stylebook, combyn and closet. In addition to appearance, functionality, and ease of use, we explored the user experience to see how they handle on-boarding, importing wardrobe elements, assembling outfits, scheduling outfits, sharing to social media as well as to spy what features they offer. None of these wardrobe assistants incorporate a sharing feature that is one of AWEAR’s primary features, or whose goal is to promote mindful shopping.

stage 4. deliver

Prototyping and testing is an iterative process through which a concept matures. Through rounds of revisions based on user feedback, is how designs achieve user centricity. Prototyping is used to test designs within development to identify flaws early, when they are still easy to fix. Repeatedly returning to the user for feedback ensures that products/services serve actual needs. Our wardrobe assistant was put to the test by several young female consumers, whose feedback was integrated into revised versions.

testing

‘PRETOTYPE’

Testing begins early on in order to validate concepts, before committing the time or resources to develop an initial prototype. We employed pretotyping methodologies by advertising our idea on Facebook while still in the conceptual stage. Simply pretending that our product had already been launched to the market was sufficient to gauge interest, validated by a 6.45% click through rate.

To test for a deeper level of commitment, we look to see if users are willing to put some skin in the game. Asking users to engage more deeply, in the form of an investment of money, time or effort shows a higher degree of interest than merely asking them if they like the idea. This is why we requested the respondents to our facebook ad to engage further with a survey. Despite having been informed that our product was still in the design stage, 10% of respondents completed our survey. These results encouraged us to produce an actual prototype, to pursue our concept further.

PROTOTYPE

LOW FIDELITY

Mock-ups are built as a quick and inexpensive way to obtain user feedback. The quickest and cheapest is a low fidelity version drawn on paper. Marvel Pop is a tool that animates simple hand drawn screens, so that users can test their functionality on a phone screen.

MEDIUM FIDELITY

The wireframe is a blueprint to illustrate the structure and navigation. As such, it does not look like a finished product, but is merely the skeleton which omits design elements such as color, images or copy. Its primary purpose is to allow users to test the flow and functionality without being distracted by design features.

Flow charts are another visual tool to chart the variety of possible operations. This helps designers by acting as an outline of screens that need to be designed

HIGH FIDELITY

As this prototype is intended to give the illusion of a finished product, it is pixel perfect in appearance, even though it lacks any real functionality. Tools like Figma, and Adobe XD give these prototypes the appearance of being working prototypes, so that they may be tested by users.  

feedback & revisions

While there is no set rule for the number of iterations a design requires until it is ready to ship, every pass in front of the user provides feedback, ensuring that a finished design closely addresses their needs.

“People, myself included, forget what they have, and go and buy something new and then realize I've got like a million of the same” – Tor, 23

NOTIFICATIONS

user feedback alerted us to the understanding that pairing a wardrobe assistant with shopping capabilities could make it far more impactful. Within the team, we initially debated whether this would dilute the sustainability goals of our product, but ultimately recognized that AWEAR could reach a far larger community if not limited to hardcore environmentally minded types. Additionally, we realized the huge potential value of providing access to digital wardrobe capabilities while you shop. In what we named the ‘mother function’, users are sent notifications as they shop online to inform them if they or one of their friends own something similar to what is in their shopping basket.

MARKETPLACE

Testers confirmed that our borrowing feature was popular, but suggested that users have the ability to buy and sell clothing, so we included a market feature to sell second hand clothes.

“In the morning I am often in a rush and forget to check the weather” – Rachel, 23

WEATHER

The need to know how to dress for the weather was raised by several users. Adding this feature creates a dual touch point, with users coming to AWEAR to get info on weather and wardrobe in one place.

MINDFUL SHOPPER

Incorporating the features suggested shifted our concept somewhat, which expanded from wardrobe management to satisfy more of our user’s needs. The iterative process that refined our design, allowed the direction of our product to grown into a mindful shopping assistant.

solution

AWEAR is a wardrobe app whose greater mission is to help users develop more sustainable shopping habits. By neatly categorizing what users or their contacts already own (and may have forgotten) it taps underutilized resources as an alternative to shopping for something new. This enhances the value of clothes, and gives them the possibility of a second life. By encouraging consumers to consider other available options before buying new, it looks to reverse the trend of throwaway fashion.

Rather than being exclusively aimed to environmentally minded people, it is designed to address the needs of a much wider community of consumers who struggle to make sustainable decisions. Recognizing that most people love to shop, and always will, it attempts to provide more sustainable options. Sharing functions facilitate the environmental and budget friendly option of looking through friends closets for something new to wear. Not exactly new, but new for the user.

It’s not about people getting more sustainable clothes but getting clothes more sustainably.

When users wish to shop at online retailers, the ‘mother’ feature gently reminds them of similar items they already own or can easily access through their network. And when users opt to shop for new items, they can set filters for minimum sustainability requirements they are comfortable with. Rather than to try to force users to only shop sustainable brands, AWEAR hopes to gradually minimize consumption by building awareness. In doing so, it answers the “I’ve got nothing to wear” dilemma on several levels.

MICRO

Personal stylist. A digital wardrobe helps users locate specific articles and pair items together to see the finished look. Maintaining an inventory enhances the value of what users have, while keeping articles in the back of the closet from being forgotten. Keeping inventory helps users determine if they really need something new, or if they already own something similar.

MEZZO

Community building. It is very natural for close friends to browse through each other’s closet for the possibility to borrow clothes. Users are encouraged to connect with friends who share a similar fashion sense. The option to borrow rather than always buy, nudges users towards to reduce consumption.

MACRO

Enlightened shopping. By offering the ability to shop new and borrowed, this app increases knowledge of options, helping users develop smarter purchase decisions. Users not wishing to borrow have the flexibility of shopping for new clothes rated for sustainability by an independent agency.

VALUE PROPOSITION

BUSINESS

1. Become known as leading sustainable fashion label

2. Gain access to consumer’s attitude and shopping behavior

3. Offer convenience to consumers by centralizing online fashion market

4. Strengthen brands’ relationship with customers

5. Develop loyalty by supporting consumers to develop their style

CONSUMER

1. 24/7 virtual wardrobe access

2. Organize outfits in advance

3. Closet extension

4. Reminders of what users already have or have access to

5. Save time and money

6. Make better informed decisions

7. Relieves the worry of “I’ve got nothing to wear”

8. Informs you if you or friends already own a similar item

9. Provides community support to help coordinating outfits

10. Clearly identifies which brands are sustainable

Making it fun and easy to shop more mindfully can extend the life of clothing, saving time, money and guilt. Consumers are able to tailor their own shopping experience, while learning to make smarter acquisitions, either through better management of their own wardrobe, sharing of clothes with friends or by considering the sustainability ratings for new purchases.

PLAN

However influential, PVH ­cannot expect to significantly influence shopper’s behavior in a solo effort. Achieving the scale necessary for significant impact will require significant industry cooperation. To accomplish this, we propose AWEAR as a white label platform, rather than limiting use to PVH consumers. This app could be hosted by a common initiative such as Fashion For Good, in order to unite the industry against wastefulness.

2021 Minimum viable product tested and iterated using PVH brands.
2022 Marketing campaigns and social media are vehicles to popularize the app among shoppers.
2023 Invite other brands to participate on the platform.
2024 Cross-cultural consumer research conducted to improve user experience.
2025 Fully transformed into a new market position, encouraging other fashion labels to join.

REFLECTION

Meaningful and impactful experiences are possible when designers consider human needs and desires. UX moves away from the “build it and they will come” mentality which relies primarily on a designer’s intuition to guess what will please consumers, rather than to simply ask them.

TEAM

Team Fast and Curious worked via distance throughout the pandemic, meeting just this once to practice prior to our client presentation, and take a group photo.