Shoes for Crews

Shoes for Crews is an industry leader in footwear safety, providing slip-resistant shoes for people who work in places like restaurants, hospitals, and manufacturing facilities. When they began a brand realignment, Shoes for Crews looked to Sparkbox to redesign their ecommerce website.

We began with an Onboarding phase to understand the current project landscape and identify the critical challenges associated with growing the business and updating branding. Through this process, we learned that Shoes for Crews needed to support multiple brand themes across their web properties. We recommended a design system to manage and extend their brand guidelines and frontend components, which could be integrated by the Shoes for Crews technical team. We also uncovered a need for an updated release pipeline to improve sustainability.

Experience Design

User experience and design are critical for an ecommerce website. The Shoes for Crews team has intentionally crafted their unique brands to foster customer loyalty. It was only natural that they wanted to continue to appeal to the uniqueness of each brand's audience on the site. But those unique brand elements needed to seamlessly blend alongside consistent components, especially on the product detail page.

We began our design explorations on Mozo, which was the most well-defined brand at the time. This allowed us to work through all the features required in wireframes and confirm that newly art-directed product photos should be the stars in the layout. Through static designs and an InVision prototype, we were able to show how the consistent layout and components could then be layered with themed brand colors and typography for on-brand, consistent experiences.

Given the dominance of mobile traffic as an ecommerce revenue-generator, we also made sure to focus on perfecting the small-screen experience.

Development

We worked with the Shoes for Crews' team to determine the build priority. We translated the designs into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components as well as documented brand and usage guidelines. The Shoes for Crews development team then used the design system to integrate the new look and feel into their content management system and ecommerce platform while we provided support.

Since its launch, the Shoes for Crews team (with occasional help from Sparkbox) has used the design system to create new features and components for the website, decreasing the amount of time spent in design and development.

We also collaborated with the Shoes for Crews team to re-architect their release pipeline to adopt continuous integration and automated deployment practices. Not only did this mean smoother collaboration between our teams to create and adopt the new designs, but now, their release process is more stable and sustainable.