Rebranding a Social Commerce Platform

In 2022, we were privileged to collaborate with Drop to reimagine their brand image and overall marketing communication. Part of a target market which is yet unheard of, Drop is a cutting-edge headless commerce solution that is changing the game of online shopping. It removes the need for traffic through traditional e-commerce sites and shifts it all to social media.

Drop reinvents the way people buy and sell online by placing a strong emphasis on improving the shopping experience for customers on social media and altering that audience into a brand’s primary acquisition channel.

At the start of every project, we work to establish a strong relationship with every client and develop a clear understanding of the product, project, and people we’ll be working with. Our approach emphasizes collaboration, open communication and transparency. We don’t believe in the magic of monthly progress “reveals”, instead we keep the client in the know with daily updates. The people at Drop are a great example of an ongoing partnership that resulted in a cohesive, modern and impactful representation of their innovative vision.

Strategy

Instead of viewing a brand strategy as a linear path from start to finish, we think of it as a journey of getting to know all the intricacies of a brand. The foundation of our strategy is established when we spend enough time at the edges, discovering every inch of the given challenge to feed our senses. Gathering all that insight on Drop guided us to find the right balance of contrasts, which ultimately served as the backbone of all of our strategies. We aimed to determine the positioning of their service in the competitive landscape, identifying the target audience, establishing the tone of voice, uncovering key insights, and assessing the cultural relevance of Drop’s mission. By answering these questions, we were able to form a strong and well-articulated idea of what they needed.

Direction

All of our research phases begin with an in-depth exploration of the challenge at hand. With all the information gathered and a set playbook (strategy) to play by, we can fully immerse ourselves in the project, documenting our visual findings through moodboards and textual references. To keep things simple for everyone involved, we typically centralize our research in Figma and Notion, creating a “living document” that’s continuously updated and referenced throughout the project. This helps us to maintain a clear focus on the visual direction, project goals and ensure that everyone involved is aligned and working towards a common objective

Design

Drop is a unique sales product that offers cutting-edge solutions to a select group of well-established direct-to-consumer brands and retailers. It allows these brands to interact with their Instagram followers on a larger scale. With this in mind, our design choices were intended to be bold, enigmatic, and appealing, to name a few. Drop is one of the few, if not the only, social commerce solutions that cater to both paid and organic social media divisions. Therefore, the design had to showcase a blend of sophisticated layouts and utilise two font families to bridge the ongoing gap between the two divisions. The brand colours of orange and purple were chosen to be complementary and put both parties at eye level, accompanied by additional less prominent colours for categorizing their content.

We take pride in creating meticulously crafted and thoughtfully organized design systems, aimed at facilitating ease of navigation for everyone involved in the project, including designers, developers, and clients. The components of these systems vary from project to project, but in the case of Drop, we included a typography scale and font pairing, grids, interactions, brand elements, and generic components that repeat throughout the website. These systems serve as a comprehensive guide, providing a clear and concise understanding of the design vision.

If you’re interested in our process of making visual guidelines, you can read more about it in our blog?here.

Thorough testing is a philosophy we apply to all of our concepts before developer hand-off is even on the table. This step is critical in many ways, including the ability to bring our designs to life and excite our clients with a visual and functional representation of our concepts. User experiences and functionalities become apparent, and prototyping also enables us to stay within budget and time constraints as well as anticipate any design errors that may occur along the way. For this step, everybody from the project is involved, from our designers to developers and the clients themselves which leads us to align on all questions related to the development of Drop’s website.

Implementation

At this stage, we ensure that the developers have all the necessary resources to structure and build the website. This project marked our first launch on Webflow, which exceeded our expectations with its swift and seamless process. Webflow’s user-friendly interface facilitated smooth collaboration between our team and the client.

Did you like what you read and are curious to hear more?

At Holographik, we stand out collaborating closely with our clients to discover their brand’s unique identity, creating lasting value and inspiring future trends. Our transparent approach and daily progress updates ensure dynamic and professional collaboration on every project.

We’d love to hear about your project and explore how we can help you push your boundaries. Feel free to reach out and share your vision with us.