Three months ago, we had our first ShipIt day in the Product and Engineering departments of STYLIGHT. Employees had the chance to work on anything that relates to our products, and deliver it during ShipIt Day, our 24-hour hackathon. We created teams, everyone felt energized and motivated, and the results were pretty fascinating.
That sparked our interest in posing a similar challenge for the entire company, in order to create an open space to bring ideas, criticism, and feedback. In the first Ideation Camp at STYLIGHT, we followed the approach of Design Thinking to leverage on the multi-disciplinary, international staff we have and to show them methods to shape their ideas.
Design Thinking is a methodology that helps you solve problems like a designer. It emphasizes empathy building, problem framing, ideation, and validating potential solutions.
Eighteen employees joined the workshop. We started right after work with a quick dinner and an intro to the process stages. Three hours later we had six fresh concepts presented by each team! It was pretty late and after a workday, however the vibe was positive all along, and the teams were pretty competitive.
Although we kept the mission open, the concepts created showed a high tendency towards personalisation and big data. Here are brief descriptions of the solutions offered by the six awesome teams:
1) Browse by Style
Searching for clothes by category is not the way how people shop for fashion in offline. When browsing through a boutique, shoppers do not go through the assortment category by category. They rather go by style, occasion or trend. However, as most online fashion sites, STYLIGHT is mainly organized around categories. With “Browse by Style” we want to change this. Alongside the category filter, a prominent style filter should help online shoppers to engage in a more natural fashion shopping experience.
Team members:
- Max Müller / Product Team
- Serena Milici / Content Team
- Baptiste Hausmann / SEO Team
2) Taste Match
Are you more into metal rock than jazz? Are you a designer or a financial consultant? We all know that your age, job, music and pet preferences say something about your style. Taste Match offers you a selection of looks and products that people who are similar to you prefer.
Team members:
- Giuliana Catalano / Content Team
- Peter Riedel / Product Team
- Simon Koestler / Performance Marketing Team
3) Hey STYLIGHT
Inspired by SIRI and the movie “Her”, the team proposed a Siri-like experience on STYLIGHT apps to help customers ask questions in their own words, and receive personalised answers in images and sound. Your very own shopping assistant!
Team members:
- Elisabeth Kröss / Business Development Team
- Dimitar Roustchev / Engineering Team
- Christina Sandjaja / Performance Marketing Team
4) Awesome Data
This team didn’t hesitate to tackle the obvious challenge: gathering and reusing data. The idea is to collect information about the user’s shopping behaviour through their journey on the site, and transform that data into valuable suggestions for the user. The information collected could include their prefered brands, colors, prices, and categories. What the user receives is better product suggestions, sale alerts, ad new collections.
Team members:
- Matthis Hoyer / Product Team
- Martijn Burgman / Content Team
- Carina Mayer / Office Management Team
5) A Man’s World
“Men buy, women shop.” Women make the larger part of our target group, they are more invested in the shopping experience, they love shopping and they react well to inspiration. Thus, men in our company feel neglected and they rebelled with a concept that brings inspiration, gamification, and even love into the fashion shopping world.
Team members:
- Konstantin Wemhoener / Business Intelligence Team
- Veronica Fischer / Performance Marketing Team
- Simone Zettl / Office Management Team
6) Global Trends
What’s trending in the streets of New York, London, and Paris? Our bloggers are universal and they know the answer. This team thought of revamping the homepage by offering less but more relevant content using bloggers looks and an algorithm that suggest the best products for a certain trend based on user’s own behaviour. Sounds doable to me!
Team members:
- Marianne Krai / Influencer Marketing Team
- Bernhard Obereder / Mobile Team
- Sabina Agarunova / Performance Marketing Team
Happy Innovation!
