CLIENT: Sparkpick

TIMELINE: April 2020 - current

TEAM: Ksu Postolnik, Elena Nikitsiuk, Larisa Zaiko, Anastassia Shtyk

ROLE: Co-founder, CEO, Creative Director, UX design

TOOLS: Wordpress, Adobe Suite, Final Cut Pro, Figma, UserTesting, Google Analytics

Case study

The story behind Sparkpick started in 2020 when my best friend Ksu and I watched the movie The True Cost. This movie, along with several sustainability-related documentaries that followed, opened our eyes to the scope of the environmental crisis going on right now. Launching a project in sustainable fashion seemed like a great way to make our contribution toward this most pressing challenge of our time. 

This project soon became Sparkpick - an eco-friendly fashion start-up that offers women curated looks from trustworthy sustainable fashion brands. As an ethical and sustainable product designer, I wanted to contribute to solving the environmental problems caused by the fashion industry. This project will walk you through my design thinking and creative process aimed at designing for behavioral change.

The problems

The garment industry is one of the most widespread sectors driving pollution and modern slavery. Most of the environmental damage happens when we manufacture fabrics because we generate colossal amounts of greenhouse gases and waste water.

It takes 2700 liters to produce one cotton t-shirt. That's enough for one person to drink for 2.5 years.

Mass-produced fashion, also known as fast fashion - is the direct result of the relentless and insatiable demands of ever increasing profits that requires our clothes to be produced at the lowest cost possible. That’s why people who make our clothing - mostly women and children - do so in unfair work conditions in the countries of the third world for as little as $1 a day.

Our lack of awareness about the environmental cost of fast fashion is what allows the status quo to persist and even expand. Humanity consumes 60% more clothing now than we did 15 years ago. We only keep these garments for half as long before throwing them in the trash. Discarded garments end up in landfills, locally and globally, emitting methane as they decompose. Methane is a greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 86 times that of CO2 on a 20-year time frame.

Research & value proposition

We started the Sparkpick project with market research. After studying market reports and relevant analytics, we came to the conclusion that this project has potential. The sustainable fashion market reached a value of $6.35 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $8.25 billion in 2023 - annual growth of 6.8%. By 2030 - $15.17 billion at growth 9.1%.

Then came user research. We kicked off an Amazon Mechanical Turk survey sent to the recipients in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. It targeted women who like fashion and are 24-50 years old. In this survey we learned that only 11% of the recipients knew what sustainable (eco-friendly) fashion was. Out of these 11%, when asked to list favorite brands, the vast majority named clothing brands that were not eco-friendly or practiced greenwashing.

After the research we came up with possible solutions to the clothing crisis in the form of the following five mini-missions:

1. Educate our audience about fast fashion and its alternative (sustainable, eco-friendly) fashion

2. Help women organize and rebuild their closets to be more sustainable.   For example, shop less, go for quality over quantity, create capsule wardrobe, etc.

3. Help women create looks easily and with confidence

4. Introduce women to sustainable fashion brands

5. Connect people to each other in their journey toward a more sustainable lifestyle

The initial business model for Sparkpick was chosen to be affiliate marketing. We planned to focus on helping create looks while addressing the other needs on our website and social media. Our tagline for the MVP became:

Sparkpick is a fashion blog that offers curated collections of eco-friendly looks.

Design personas

In addition to the aforementioned survey, we also did in-person interviews with women who are in fashion; some of them - into sustainable fashion. We received some valuable feedback and since then have been interviewing at least one person per week. Eventually, we came up with our two design personas after months of user research and refining - Hero and Innocent personas.

Branding Guide

Our user research and design personas informed us about possible color combinations and shapes for our branding. We chose black, white and grey as a base and dusty pink / coral red for the accent colors. Sparkpick logo shape reflects the company values - fashion, nature with a heart for love, and a crown for quality. The typography choice was also guided by three of our personas. Oswald typeface resonated with the Hero design persona, Playlist Script - with the Innocent archetype, and Roboto is a more neutral typeface that matches well with both.

MVP launch & problems

We launched the MVP of the Sparkpick website in October 2020. It included three main features: Lookbooks with links to products from sustainable brands, Style Guide with lessons on closet detox and building a personal style, and the blog. Although we were able to build some following on Instagram, it soon became obvious that our website needed more.

After several usability testing sessions, we identified 4 main problems. First, people were not clear how we select sustainable clothing brands. Second, the illustrations we used on the website and Instagram were not very popular - people wanted to see more images and more “real faces”. Third, the blog posts appeared to be too lengthy, and people barely got through the first half of a post. Last but not least, we learned that our users are at the different stages of the sustainable fashion journey and have very different needs.

Solution 1: “How we pick products” page

We added a page “How we pick products” that explains our process behind choosing sustainable fashion brands and clothing items (1.2). This page is directly related to our Lookbook, so we added it as a third item in the submenu (1.1). We also added a link to this page from the main Lookbook page (1.3) and from the individual look pages (1.4). Almost immediately, we started getting positive feedback about this feature and our customers noted that they had a clearer understanding of our business proposition and what we do in general.

Solution 2: Removing illustrations

In our MVP, Style Guide pages were very illustration-heavy because our initial plan was to experiment with a more creative visual approach. However, what we learned in user research was that people didn’t find them relatable and engaging. To solve this problem (2.1), we replaced the Style Guide illustrations with photos (2.2):

Solution 3: Content trimming & grouping

The long-grid blog posts turned out to be a problem as well. Both my co-founder and I are originally from Russia, and people there are in general avid readers. However, this is not the case for the US, and we saw it clearly during our user research. We made the decision to trim the Style Guide content (3.1) and split it into a few smaller blog posts (3.2).

Since the Style Guide will have five sections in the future, we also grouped existing contents into sections to let our visitors know that we are still actively working on adding more content. This also helped us solve the problem of “overpromising”. A large roadmap was included in the first blog post and is visible from the Landing page so that people know what to expect.

Solution 4: Identifying the main persona

Usability testing, website traffic data from Google Analytics, and Instagram social following analysis have been showing us that our visitors have very distinct needs. Some of them were not familiar with sustainable fashion at all but curious about it. They were unlikely to engage in our DIY content or long grid blog posts on sustainability. There were also women who were already familiar with the concept. There were also some observations about the age groups: people in the age group 30+ were more likely to engage in the Sparkpick content. Many of them were smaller sustainable fashion business owners. 

We are currently working with a team of mindful UX designers on refining our primary design persona and her needs. In Q3 in 2021, we are planning to redesign the website with these needs in mind.

Project takeaways

Designing for behavioral change is a challenging endeavor.

What we’ve learned so far is that transitioning to sustainable fashion goes hand in hand with transitioning to an eco-friendly lifestyle in general. These changes take time, a certain level of awareness, and can be possible only after fulfilling our basic and physiological human needs. As a designer, it is important to know that these things are out of your control, not to give up, and give people a chance to digest the truth.

I also learned in this project the importance of ongoing user research to help refine the product for just one primary design persona. It’s better to be everything to someone than something for everyone.