It's been almost a year since a crack team of Conchango experts went up to Bradford and delivered a little flash application that a year on is still being shown around the world and still being discussed at retail seminars as one of the key innovation ideas that has been successfully delivered in the last few years..
So after such a long time sitting in my "drafts" that it was time to tell the story I decided that now is a good time to have a slight diversion from the usual ranting's from deep within the digital media world and have a little spot on the other wonderful innovations that we did a year ago!
The crack Conchango team were dropped into the northern territory of Bradford to work with OTTO (UK) - my first question was "OTTO ? - a carnivorous aquatic or marine mammal part of the family Mustelidae, which also includes weasels, polecats, badgers - then realised that OTTO was in fact Otto UK (formerly Grattan/Freemans) is the UK subsidiary of Germany’s Otto Versand - the world’s largest mail-order company, and one of the biggest online retailers. Otto UK’s 9,000 staff generate revenues of £815 million per annum through both online sales and approximately 3 million seasonally issued catalogues.
The mission: to deliver a high street experience of browsing through a department store type environment and as one does - gather your items, ready to then go into the dressing rom and try them on for size, colour matching and generally the whole outfit!
Right... make a store experience of trying out clothes and stuff online- how do we do this - we thought??
Simple, you have some of the most talented guys in Conchango (were all talented here at Conchango - but this team did gel like a good super glue!) - lock them in a dimly lit room - bring in stakeholders and managers from the client that have an opinion and idea of what they want - and bingo in 3 days we have a Plan - and a raft of phenomenal ideas to boot. Then decide that instead of delivering the usual raft of A4 documentation - we decided (well Mr Venter in his infinite wisdom) that lets push the boundaries of what is expected from a discovery piece of work, to show what we really can do if you go beyond what is expected!! So we locked ourselves away in a scabby Hilton business lounge (never heard of wi-fi or customer service??) and spent the day adding all of our elements into a beautiful A3 compendium of work.
The result was that within 48hrs the client arrived in our London offices, went through the compendium with one of the team and our MD and the "Look Book" deal was done!
The next 29 days were full on integration into the clients team, getting to know them, them getting to know us, seeing how we work. Pushing the limits of a tight timeframe which was a stressful time for everyone (losing days and gaining days back) all over the place - but stuck with the 29 days in the end, a wonderful achievement from the whole team and the client was great as well.
So what did we have to do?? Integrate with Scene7 image store, work with Endeca and return product information based on the master slave relationship, hit their mainframe (called The Matrix) which was run by the CIO called.... Mr Anderson! (really!!) Then create a flash overlay that would do all these things while at the same time overlay over a classic ASP framework - with so much work and dedication by Mr van Rooijen we knew that this was going to be possible and achievable.
As I said at the start of this post - there has been a lot about this project that has been discussed all over the world from Australia to North America, Europe and into Asia - and even as recent as today it has been cited in another online discussion http://www.designweek.co.uk/Articles/138435/Going+virtual.html I have talked enough about it (as I'm sure people at Conchango would tell you!!) and enough press and publications as well.
Although you have to ask the question, why a year after it launched is our Look Book still being discussed. Well quite simply it was designed from a pure retail and ecommerce perspective that we know and understand inside and out - it was created with the user in mind and delivered from a true bunch of professionals. Other copies / imitators have come and gone in that year, because they were either to flashy and had no real retail substance, or not user centric designed enough and therefore too complicated for the user to understand or interact with, and that is why it has stood the test of time and still as relevant as it was a year ago.
Where next then?
We kept up the tradition and delivered a 42page compendium to accompany the final Look Book that had some future thinking and deliverables in there to keep them going for another 2 - 3 years, social shopping, live interaction with your friends, etc... so the possibilities are endless. Also we would like to try a Silverlight version of the Look Book as well - but we'll see what the future holds.
Below some pictures from the Project and Compendiums... or just visit www.oli.co.uk
