I created the end-to-end experience of this e-commerce platform for fashion sellers and buyers. Today, $1B of merchandise is offered on the platform.
When New York based startup INTURN set out to create the first global marketplace to efficiently and easily sell end-of-season/excess inventory to retailers in private online showrooms, they engaged me to create their end-to-end user experience. I worked with the founders starting with a blank slate through the successful launch as a consultant.
From the very beginning, I worked directly with the founders. They had an idea, excellent connections in the fashion industry, and $750K in seed funding.
INTURN's business goals were:
My role: Design the 0 to 1 end-to-end experience.
We started with a 2 day offsite to kick off the project during which I gained a thorough understanding of the business idea and the problem INTURN was solving.
Throughout the project, my approach was based on:
INTURN's main users are sellers and buyers of excess inventory. Examples of sellers are large global Fashion Brands such as Michael Kors or PVH. Buyers are discount retailers like TJMaxx or ROSS.
In collaboration with the founders, I created two personas, Steven Seller and Bob Buyer, to capture user needs, guide the design of the experience, and help align communication among the team.
Steven works at a large global Fashion brand and is in charge of selling excess inventory. His goals are to sell inventory fast and to maximize return.
Bob is an apparel buyer at a large Discount Retailer. His goals are buying styles that sell and will be profitable for the business.
I worked closely with the founders and two fashion industry executives as advisors to understand the needs of fashion sellers and buyers.
In order to trade on the platform and enable an experience that covered the nuances of the way they did business, these were the features that were part of the initial roadmap.
The next step was to define the Information Architecture of the platform based on the mental models of the users. The main relevant concepts were line items, listings, offers, and seller's / buyer's business contacts respectively. These formed to cornerstones of the navigation.
The sitemap also doubled as a project tracker with status and estimated complexity of features.
This is an example of a typical spreadsheet with inventory that a seller would send to a buyer. It shows the very limited information that buyers have to make purchasing decisions over 10s or 100s of thousends of dollars. Buyers would receive emails from many sellers with spreadsheets attached.
There is no easy way to search listings across mulitple sellers or even across different listings from the same seller. Indicative of a big pain point, INTURN set out to address this and give buyers rich information and an easy way to narrow down the selection of listings.
One of the significant improvements that INTURN provides is rich information about the products buyers are purchasing. Closer to consumer sites, I designed search results, refinements, and a product details page that gives buyers a detailed view to enable them to make decisions about whhat to purchase, the quantities available, the cost, and lets them analyze margins with a pupose build feature.
Buyers now have a rich set of information allowing them to make quick purchasing decisions. Welcome to the 21st century. E-commerce arrives in the excess inventory world.
While the design is informed by consumer products, there are some critical differences: 01 Industry Specific Refinements 02 Pricing Information 03 Sizes and Quantities 04 No Reviews 05 Industry Product Info
Buyers can see all listings that are availble to them from every seller in one place.
Buyers can find listings that match their buying criteria with searching and filtering.
Each listing has a view where the buyer can get a quick view of all styles, sizes, and quantities in the listing. together with pricing for the entire listing or to individual styles depending how the seller structured the sale.
The buyer can add styles or the entire listing to an offer depending on what the seller allows. Once the offer is submitted, it is visible to the seller in realtime.
The sections of the page correspond to the steps the seller goes through in the listing wizard.
The screen shows the listing page ready to publish. The seller can also make changes to each section.
The sections of the page correspond to the steps the seller goes through in the listing wizard.
The screen shows the listing page ready to publish. The seller can also make changes to each section.
In this scenario buyers can bid on the listing, they must purchase the entire listing and there is no minimum bid.
Below is a detailed view of the module that lets the seller structure their offer.
The specific features and actions a buyer can take in this process depends on the listing settings the seller selected.
This flow shows how a buyer creates an order for the single buyer, single listing with counteroffers but no cherrypicking.
Speed is of the essence, sellers and buyers are often on the road and trade from their phone or tablet. I designed everything fully responsive to enable them to access the marketplace from anywhere.
I turned what started with a two page outline of INTURNs business into an end-to-end experience. In the process I designed over 800 screens in over 100 flows, specs, prototypes, and investor deck slides.
When INTURN launched, my designs had helped them sign up 3 global fashion brands as clients before the launch. They used my prototype in their investor presentation that enabled them to secure $3.6M in funding before the launch as well.
Since then, INTURN has raised more than $50M in additional funding. They have grown to over 100 employees and more than $1B of merchandise are available on their platform at any given moment.
I learned to design for scale, create a complex information architecture, a design system, and how all these elements work together to create a successful business. Owning the entire experience gave me a lot of freedom and a lot of responsibility being a critical contributor to making the business successful.
Working with Inturn let me apply my broad expertise in user centered design. In addition to learning about the intricate workings of the fashion business, I was able to translate a complex transactional market into an end to end experience.
