Think of Apple, but for athletic apparel, and you’ll get RYU apparel.
What building an urban-centric, digitally focused brand looks like in one of the most competitive segments of the fashion industry – athletic apparel.
RYU is the perfect aspirational brand for all those seeking technical athletic apparel, innovative fabrics, and high-performing designs to wear when training, running or going to and from a workout. RYU’s offering of distinctive and high-quality products, matched with the thriving community of like-minded individuals gathering around the brand, what we might term today’s urban athlete, are here to service all needs of their core consumer base, above and beyond sport.
There’s more than just pure play: RYU is also known for its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitment, its award-winning patented designs, and is a recognized thought leader in the field of mental health awareness thanks to its #OneMoreRep campaign, recognized as social media campaign of the year in 2017.
So what's the challenge?
How do you make an athletic brand stand out from the noise? Within the hyper-competitive athletic apparel space, the top 5 takeaways that we prioritized for RYU were:
Selectivity and exclusivity: appeal to customers' specific needs with diverse body types and physical pursuits.
Digital simplicity, design, and tonality cannot be underestimated and should be commensurate with RYU’s product design, marrying utility, technology, and practical ‘marketing’ throughout all customer interactions.
Simplify, yet be 1 step better than the competition related to policies such as customer guarantees, return processing, and back-end order processing for RYU.
Quality is aspirational, and innovation is critical: incorporate tagging, iconography, and visually stimulating patents and technical features education.
Make the community work for you, with you. Cultivate loyalty, leverage offline events, and let the customers do the talking on RYU’s products.
Re-designing a brand that lasts
We collaborated with the RYU in-house team and 3rd Party partners to re-architect RYU. Our priority was to re-establish it as a digital urban apparel destination, ready to tackle the ambitious goal of targeting cool and aspirational consumers looking for clothes that could fully satisfy their needs for performance, style, comfort, and ultimately ensure that they are living their best life no matter what activity they may be engaged in.
“A savvy and carefully orchestrated blend of experiences and assets allowed us to outline a new way forward: through a preliminary system migration from Shopify to Magento placing the consumer at the center of the RYU.com experience, and making the product the hero.”
Responsive Design
I created screens in five sizes across desktop and mobile for a responsive, mobile-first, eCommerce experience.
Business Goals
RYU wanted to increase new user sales conversion by 15% without affecting retention and expanding their customer base.
How we achieved this
Mailchimp Email Marketing
Newer, Easier to use form field submissions and pop-ups
International shipping options and currency conversions
Improved eCommerce for a better customer experience
““RYU has become a staple collection due to its fit and quality.””
