Shop beautifully.
As a Creative Director at Blast Radius in 2006, we worked with Crate & Barrel to help overhaul their online shopping experience. Beyond just redesigning their existing e-commence offering, we also created 2 new marquee features: A Visual Shopping Cart, and user-curated Collections.
Given the importance of aesthetics to the Crate & Barrel shopping and brand experience, the Visual Shopping Cart allowed customers to visually compare and contrast products across different categories. They way they could determine if everything visually worked together, without needing to jump in and out of the cart (or printing pictures of the various products, which many people surprisingly were).
Collections was a natural compliment to the Visual Shopping Cart, and enabled customers to compile various products into private or sharable boards. While commonplace now, Collections also pushed the boundaries of what was technically possible, with things like drag & drop and image transparency. The underlying technology was also used by Crate & Barrel to showcase their seasonal product offerings.
Pitch in a box.
The Crate & Barrel pitch was by far the most unusual (and satisfying) I've ever lead. Responses to a RFP of this scale are usually done in a face-to-face presentation. But C&B was asking for something different. After making our way through the procurement process, they had requested that we submit a printed copy of our final presentation in advance, which would be reviewed to determine if we'd be invited to come back and present it in person.
While we were keen to win their business, we had 2 issues with their approach: Should we be invited to present in person, submitting the deck in advance would eliminate any chance of showmanship, and it would be incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to properly communicate the subtleties of our creative ideas and interaction details. So we decided to respond in a slightly different way.
Instead of just printed copies of our response, we also submitted a large handcrafted box (one of our designers was also a trained bookmaker). Inside were all the supporting materials, plus a MacBook that launched a Keynote presentation when powered on. The presentation auto-advanced through the slides, complete with an audio narration I had recorded to fully communicate our thinking.
Thankfully, this was well received as we were asked to come back and present in person... and ultimately win the pitch :)
