The who, what, why and how of open-wear.com

Written by Martijn Jegerings

14th December 2017

In this picture: Step by step towards the goal

-9°C

105cm

St. Anton, Austria

Over the past months, we’ve been putting a lot of time into creating the website you are reading this article on.

As an outerwear brand, you’d probably not expect us to go into detail about it. But in our pursuit of bringing full transparency, we’d like to explain a few things more in detail.

First of all, who did we work with? This website was not created internally, but we worked together with Build in Amsterdam.

I (Martijn) have worked together with the guys on several projects already and I was very confident that they could help us built a platform that translates our brand values into a clear, usable website.

The project started back in December 2016 during the initial briefing. Just before the delivery of the first Kickstarter project.

“ The main goal: Build a platform to inspire and educate about sustainable ways to ride the mountain. ”

Below some words by the guys from Build in Amsterdam, explaining their process towards the new website.

The two biggest challenges for this project were creating a suitable, online brand identity and finding a way to communicate all the aspects of the brand, its products and community.

Step 1: Create brand identity + subtle redesign of the logo

Being a start-up, Open Wear still needed to fully develop it’s brand identity when they came to us. So, we started by devising a visual language. The new logo, font and colours are a big part of this. We worked on it with many designers and explored multiple art directions.

It took us some time to find the right tone of voice. Finally, this resulted in a very open, product-qualitative and community-driven design. On the other hand, it was important for us to not overdo the design to make it accessible for every rider.

Step 2: Design

With the new identity set, we had to focus on communicating all the different aspects of the brand. Open Wear has a lot to offer and even more to tell.

From a design point of view, it was a challenge to articulate the brand mission and identity, show and let people interact with the community, communicate the sustainable and highly qualitative products, show why it’s cheaper than comparable products and still keep a minimal aesthetic to keep the message simple.

In this picture: The category page as it is now…

In this picture: Somewhere in the middle of the process…

In this picture: And how it began.

In this picture: The category page as it is now…

“ From a design point of view, it was a challenge to articulate the brand mission and identity ”

In this image: Jonathan Frossard cruising down a steep couloir.

Step 3: Development

Having a great design doesn’t mean, having a great performing final website. To be able to create both a perfect and safe online shopping experience, as well as a place for community content, we decided to go for a combination of WordPress and WooCommerce.

WordPress gives us the flexibility to create content for and from our community, while WooCommerce is the native integration to this environment.

One of the core advantages of WooCommerce is that it allows us to easily expand and integrate with all kind of different services.

The interacting diagonal lines formed some of the hardest challenges for the development, together with the pricing.

Open Wear went with a new approach to pricing. They do not discount any of our products in general. However, give you a discount based on your help towards the brand.

Few examples:

1) You can collect discount points, which allow you to buy all products at a fixed discount, from 2 to 20%. You can collect these by commenting, like and sharing articles, submitting product reviews and of course buying products. More on this on your account page.

2) If you help to realise a product and buy it weeks before it’ll be delivered, you get it for a pre-order price.

3) If you order a set of products, you get a discount for combining the products.

Even though this might sound easy, development-wise this means that all product prices are a variable influenced by four different factors, as well as multi-currency and with multiple VAT rules.

Some of the things we are most proud of are the image galleries and the scrolling map.

So far, the little insight by Build in Amsterdam into the website.

We are very proud that all the work has now been awarded by a lot of positive feedback and even two actual awards: Awwwards SOTD and DEVAWARD.

Let us know if you would like to know anything else. Feel free to drop any suggestion for improvements in a comment as well.

Jordan

16th January 2019

Huge fan. The attention to detail is very much appreciated.

David

9th January 2019

Everything on this website is SO nicely done, written and designed! quite refreshing for clothing brand

Bart

25th October 2018

I really like the small animations and interactions, great job.

Martijn

26th October 2018

Thanks for the compliments Bart, we are also very happy with the animations and interactions. The guys of Build in Amsterdam did a great job :)

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