The Brief
The Danish jewellery brand Maria Black wants to create meaningful, immersive, personalised experiences, elicit emotional responses, and fulfilment at the consumer level, this both online and at the retail level.
Based on emotional branding and experience economy you will have to create a more valuable brand experience for the Maria Black customers. You must consider the customer experiences with regards to current mega trends such as social inclusivity, transparency, sustainability, and individualisation.
You have to ensure that Maria Blacks products can be experienced fully on all platforms/ touch points across the customer journey; with specific considerations on the cohesiveness between the web shop and physical space thus achieving a coherent customer experience across platforms.
Based on your research you need to write a Business Strategy document for Maria Black and, and your suggestions have to be visualised in a Brand Guidelines website and expressed in a company manifest supporting an action plan for new business strategies.
Androgyny is the new black
Our concept draws upon inclusivity in general, and gender fluidity in particular. This is the direction that our research pointed us in, and the visualisation of what we believe are great suggestions to upgrade the company.
We wrote a manifest for the new Maria Black where we incorporated what we believe in for the company, and also wrote new mission and vision statements. One of the big changes was that production would only take place in fair trade certified workshops.
We created a persona for our concept.
We also created Design Drivers and a moodboard for our concept
Retail strategy
A part of our concept was the retail strategy we created.
We made a sensory moodboard to show the mood we want for the store. The moodboard features artist Tash Sultana who identifies as neither male or female, a scented candle, clean linen, and luxurious textures.
This is our colour scheme. We chose neutral and earthy colours, which look exclusive in a calm way.
Storytelling
We see Maria Black’s core customers becoming more and more open minded and sympathetic towards people that go outside of the norms and dare to be themselves, no matter the conventions. This inspires them, so we built our storytelling on Oliver, a brave human being who carved out his own place in the world.
We have featured the story of Oliver on the Brand guidelines site. He grew up an outsider, feeling isolated and who was bullied for being who he was. He turned this around, found himself and dared to pursue his dreams in Copenhagen. Oliver is an up- and coming fashion designer and loves mixing and matching jewellery. He is a future visionary.
Here is an excerpt of an interview with Oliver featured on the Brand guidelines website.
Packaging & Display
For the packaging we chose to use a marble look on all the boxes. The boxes close with a ”snap”. The inside is a velvet lining that is soft and secure to ensure the jewellery stays in place. We will work together with Re-bag, a packaging company focused on sustainable packaging, to ensure the materials are sustainable and do not make the jewelry tarnish faster than it should. The design communicates exclusivity and luxury at the same time as keeping the jewellery safe.
When we visited the store, we felt that the displays and tables were unstable and did not feel exclusive, which is something we wanted to remedy. We chose to make displays that look and feel sturdy and heavy, to make the jewellery stand out as the special pieces they are.
The display tables will be illuminated from under, so the marble panels will be lit up with a soft white light. This is enlightenment in the physical sense, both to create the luxurious and tactile feeling of exclusivity, and to stress the enlightenment we see in society about inclusivity.
Online strategy
On the website, we wanted to create a more cohesive layout. When not moving the mouse, all photos are model pictures, but when hoovering the picture it changes to a product picture. On each model picture, you can see the size and placement of the jewelry.
We have used our theme colors in the photos to create a coherent look throughout the website. as well as connecting it with the in store experience.
You can experience the online strategy as well as the rest of the concept in detail on the website we made, which you can visit by entering the password: KEABlack
To dive deeper into this project, explore the Business, Design and Technology areas below.
