2021
Content and Experience Design
‘Bra Revolution’
An adidas campaign
Client
Clubhouse Studios for adidas
Timing
3 months
Activities
Content Strategy, Design System, Production, Digital Strategy, Wireframing, Copywriting
Team
UX designer, UX Associate Director, the wider Clubhouse Production Team, adidas Content Managers
Deliverables
Full digital journey with high-fidelity wireframes
Content Delivery Toolkit
Copy and Imagery
Background
Clubhouse Studios creative studio is a key digital partner for Adidas. They manage their digital campaigns by providing holistic digital strategy, producing digital assets, writing the copy and more. I was brought on as a freelancer to help them with the launch of some of their digital campaigns during the summer of 2021.
The adidas Bra Revolution was an exciting campaign, with a new line of inclusive and versatile sports bras being launched, designed by women to suit all body shapes and sizing, for various sporting activities. Adidas wanted to make this into a bigger global launch that drummed up some attention and excitement in the sports bra space.
This role was a heavily focussed on content strategy and experience design, where we worked alongside the adidas in-house team whom already used a global content management system.
“When athletes have a seat at the table and a female-led team designs sports bras that enable us to see new possibilities”
User problem/Brief
Make bra shopping easy. The brief was to improve the current bra shopping experience for adidas customers, by helping them find the right size and fit and giving consumers the confidence to overcome the usual barriers. The digital bra shopping experience needed to be best in class digital bra shopping, and anchor adidas as the best brand for the female athlete shopping online.
KPI’s
Encourage quality traffic
Creators Club sign-ups (now called adi club)
Touchpoint conversion rate and bounce rate
User generated content
Consumer engagement (e.g. real-life events, or app challenges)
Approach
We needed to better understand how people approach bra shopping. Clubhouse Studios had previously undertaken a project prior to my joining where they did a discovery deep dive on this topic, so I had lots of existing research material to work from.
Research had been conducted previously
With the previous research as a resource to hand, some key findings were established. Some women find it difficult to find the right bra as sizing in the market can be imprecise and have variable sizing. For example, a ‘Small’ or ‘Large’ might be very different sizes across different brands. Research also found that many women (64%) experience breast discomfort during exercise, this is the outcome of wearing an ill-fitting bra for their needs.
Interestingly the average bra size in the UK has changed over the last 11 years, going from a 34B to now a 36DD. The current sizing at adidas isolates a large number of this sizing group due to traditionally smaller sizing, therefore providing a lot less choice and losing appeal to many potential customers.
Bra size is also not exclusively about fit. Of course, the main aim is for the bra to be the right fit and be comfortable, it is also important to find a bra that provides the right support level for varying levels of physical activity. 80% of this support will come from the under-band.
Based on the research findings, it was concluded that there is no one particular persona to base the experience around. Rather, it is important to take into account the various mind-sets that may impact their buying choices.
For example. The customer may:
- Be limited by her/their size
- Have minimal knowledge about the category
- Shop based on activity
- Think she/they knows their size, this can change over time.
And some key themes were found
Some key themes emerged from the research which were distilled into our main focus areas:
Priority 1 - Simplify
Simplify the existing bra shopping experience, making sizing and support levels easy to understand
Priority 2 - Educate
Educate on the importance of finding the correct sports bra for breast size and activity
Priority 3 - Inspire
Inspire, through education and content that advises on fit, aftercare and lifecycle of sports bras
Process and Execution
Simplified the user journey
For this we need to take a look at the current journey and see where improvements could be made, whilst not needing an overhaul of the core structure of the product listing and product pages. This was really an optimisation piece to see where we could enhance this experience using existing components, as these were managed and available from a centralised library. We looked at:
A. The product listing pages where we were presented with all bras and filters. This was overwhelming, the size selector had unclear sizing with not much additional sizing info.
B. Bra spport needed for the activity type was poorly explained - they were selectable through a filter, but very basic.
2. Educate on the importance of a correct fitting sports bra
Very little content existed on the website to inform customers about how to find the right fitting bra for your shape and physical activity. This was a key piece that needed particular attention.
3. Inspire, with user-generated content
All imagery and models were quite homogenous. Everything looked the same and this made finding or identifying with a certain product more difficult. There was a lack of authentic and real-life imagery of women wearing the items, showcasing the product in a more natural environment.
Shifting the campaign's focus towards customer-centricity, the idea involved enlisting a group of super testers, which comprised a diverse group of everyday women who would receive the bras prior to the product launch. The goal was to leverage their experiences and insights to develop user-generated content and images.
We created a bespoke digital journey for those super Testers.
Create a bra finder tool as a wayfinder
One key piece was to create and implement a Bra finder tool – This would be heavily signposted and would be key to guiding customers on a step by step journey to find the right bra type and size. This tool was taken on as a project in-house at adidas, Clubhouse would design all digital journeys knowing that tool was going to be available as a resource.
New purposeful educational content in the form of a centralised hub
Our proposal involved developing a comprehensive and centralised digital destination called the "Bra Hub," which would serve as a one-stop-shop for all the necessary bra-related support for customers. This would include information about booking in-store appointments, the latest product lines, size and fit recommendations, and community content.
Enhanced PLPs and PDP’s
We proposed to introduce a colour coding system on the PLP’s, where the various bra types were matched to those colours, making them more easily identifiable. For example, green was ‘Studio’ bras for sports like Yoga, Pilates etc.
We also wanted to leverage existing components like the QA module to be able add more educational on the page, which was expandable so they wouldn’t take up too much space.
My role, as part of the wider creative team
I collaborated closely with the Associate and UX Director to work through our approach to the brief, and I created many of the wireframes which were presented to adidas teams as we went through the sign-off process. Together we created comprehensive user journey plan that takes a holistic approach and looked at all channels and how they worked together. The final main deliverable was a presentation pack which included a detailed content launch plan and high-fidelity wireframes and suggested visual content.
Outcome
The new bra products were launched after my stint at Clubhouse Studios had ended, so unfortunately I don’t have the analytics, but it looked great when I saw it live on the adidas website.
Creating a wireframe components library for future use
Clubhouse collaborates with Adidas on a regular basis throughout the year, so they have developed a regular format for their wireframe documents. But some aspects of the wireframe building process were unnecessarily manual, requiring the designer working on the project to search for the appropriate component or start from scratch each time. To address this issue, I proactively created a comprehensive working document with pre-created wireframe components. This document would facilitate future projects by making it easier for anyone involved in the wire framing process.
