At Escape Hatch, we’re big fans of small businesses. They’re agile, creative, and we’ve found that the owners are some of the most passionate people around. So when we met with Anne Harrill, the owner of an amazing handmade jewelry brand, Océanne, we were excited about where our partnership could lead.
Identifying the Problem
Like all of our projects, we started the conversation by discussing Anne’s goals for the brand and the milestones on her radar for the next year. Océanne has experienced awesome growth over the last 10 years, and it’s outgrown Anne’s spare bedroom and moved into its own storefront studio just down the street from our office in Gordon Square. With all this growth came expansion to Océanne’s product lines, staff, and ambitions. Over coffee, Anne told us about an upcoming event she was really excited about. The MAGIC Marketplace Show in Las Vegas and the associated POOL Tradeshow would be the first time Océanne took the show on the road in a big and new way, and they wanted to be prepared to make a splash (pun intended) with all of the wholesalers in attendance.
Get’chu Some Goals
For a creative agency, when a client says “make a splash,” our ears perk up. The opportunity to do something new combined with a lot of creative freedom is the reason we’re in this business. So a plan was hatched to develop a system of creative assets that worked seamlessly together but could also be used independently of each other. We hate design waste where assets created for one project are so specific that they can’t be used for anything else. That type of inefficiency is bad for budgets, especially those of small businesses. After more discussions with Océanne’s team, we developed a list of goals for the project:
- Beautifully display the breadth of Océanne’s product line
- Develop a way for wholesalers to browse and shop Océanne’s offerings in a way that felt exclusive and special
- Make sure each asset we developed could live on its own beyond the one-week event
- Be conscious of cost while producing a professional looking and feeling end-product
The Solution
With goals created, we set forth to lay out our vision of a powerful, visual print piece ⸻ a product lookbook that would give a potential customer the physical feeling of the brand that’s so hard to achieve with a digital-only experience. To tie the lookbook to revenue-generating opportunities, we devised a way to make the print piece immediately shoppable. Our solution was a designed print insert that invites prospective buyers to visit a password-protected online store made and priced specially for them. We wanted the insert to feel elegant and exclusive, reflecting the brand’s style and high-end appeal.
“To tie the lookbook to revenue-generating opportunities, we devised a way to make that print piece immediately shoppable.”
Because Océanne can choose when to include the insert, the lookbook can stand on its own and be handed out to regular customers at the store or at future events. Likewise, the wholesale online store is always open and can be accessed from a password that can be sent by email or distributed to a mailing list collected throughout the year. Both experiences have shelf-life and can be used and adapted in the future as needed.
Sounds Good, You Have 3 Weeks
With only 4 weeks to go before the MAGIC conference and accounting for a week at the printer, the mad dash to execute the lookbook started. The process kicked off with a stakeholder round-table hosted at our offices, where we learned about the history of the brand, its design philosophy, successes, failures, and lessons learned along the way. With these stories freshly stored in our heads, creative began the process of reviewing the assets the brand had generated over the years and used that to inform a storyboard and wireframed layout of the lookbook. Using some initial ideas for the flow of the book, strategy began to develop a story to weave throughout the book. Once asset reviews were completed and some initial story concepts had taken shape, creative transitioned to art direction, and a series of rapid fire photo shoots for both flat product lays and model shots were organized.
While gaps in product and photography were being filled, we took to the digital world to flesh out the wholesale store experience. Océanne’s staff organized and merchandised the store while we designed the pages and mechanisms for letting customers (but not Google) into the experience
As things progressed, frequent informal meetings and quick trips to each other’s offices proved crucial to quick decision-making and on-the-fly reviews. By the week before MAGIC, both teams were feeling great about the experience we were building and the use of a local printer enabled us to get a hard copy proof of the lookbook and insert early enough to make sure errors or issues were corrected before the prints ran.
After a crazy couple of weeks, Anne and her team boarded the plane to Vegas with freshly printed lookbooks in-hand, and the online experience launched and waiting for its first visitors.
Special thanks to:
Anne, Olivia, Doc, and the amazing staff at Océanne
Alexis Rosen Photography
Jakprints
Fount, Cleveland
Looking for a partner that can execute your vision in any medium? Escape Hatch is a multi-talented firm of strategists, creatives, and developers that builds your dreams across a variety of media. Let’s connect.