Darrow
A website to express, inform and sell — for a diverse audience.
Darrow is one of the most renowned Brazilian cosmetic brands that’s been around since 1940. It has undergone a significant change in its branding strategy, realigning its foundations, and now needs to translate it into its digital platforms.
The initial briefing for the redesign was to match their new business strategy, including their new brand vision. It was important to tighten the connection with their customers and collect consumer data to enhance future marketing strategies.
Their old website had a basic institutional approach and didn’t have a CMS solution built in, which they considered essential to showcase their best qualities and excellence regarding dermatologic research.
The new website plan was to merge institutional content, with a solid emphasis on both blog posts and informative product pages, and integrate it with a third-party e-commerce store.
I was resposible for the entire website design, from planning until the handoff. I was led by my company's Project Manager and worked alongside the in-house developers and copyrighters. Some of the hats I wore during this project were:
During the initial phase of the project, we first took a step back to understand better the areas we needed to focus on. We benchmarked the top 10 competitors in the market, tackling both the Brazilian share of the market as well as the global trend. We also aligned the expectations with the stakeholders to ensure we were on the same track.
We then downloaded our learnings with all the information we gathered and came down to the top 5 goals and topics that were crucial for the project and would clarify the design decisions in the ideation stage.
We saw an opportunity to be the first cosmetic brand to provide scientific information about the product and discuss the products from a commercial standpoint.
The brand website was outdated and wasn’t highlighting itself as a brand. It was too generic and, therefore, precisely the opposite of what Darrow stands for.
Considering the website will work as an online store and an institutional website, it was the perfect combination to work on Darrow’s brand awareness. Regarding its design aspect, we came to a conclusion that every page on the website should have a dedicated section for SEO content.
One of the project’s core points is working with content and e-commerce hand in hand. The key is finding the right balance between delivering valuable content and selling products, tracing the right line to avoid an intrusive experience.
The brand vision is about being inclusive, which was considered one of the core points of the project. It should also reflect on the structure of the website.
With the goals and themes established, we started to brainstorm some possible design solutions and sketch some low-fidelity prototypes to quickly test out and access the solutions that could work the best.
The tight deadline heavily affected the ideation state. The design solutions couldn’t be tested in the real world, so we had to rely on gut-checking based on the previously established principles.
Once we chose a clear design solution, we presented the medium fidelity prototypes to the stakeholders more immersed in the project. We iterated on the design based on their feedback. We then proceeded to high-fidelity prototypes that we presented to all stakeholders involved.
We came down to a few more iteration rounds and came up with a design solution fully aligned with the stakeholders’ goals.
With the design thoroughly approved by all stakeholders involved, we started the hand-off process to the engineers, of which we also had to come to a few compromises to meet the final deadline.
Once the new website was live, it immediately positively impacted the brand communication, especially for having a fully integrated CMS to publish all their content and a complete institutional page tackling both the product and each product they have.
The delivery has been divided into two stages: the first one is the MVP, with the bare bones of an institutional website with a CMS; the second stage is the integration with a third-party e-commerce store that’s still under production.
The main takeaway from this project is how important it is to engage the engineers earlier in the process, even in solutions considered “simple”. Due to the tight deadlines we had to work with, we decided to hand off the project to the engineering team only after the stakeholders fully approved the design. We had to come to a few compromises on the design to meet the deadline the dev team had at their disposal.
Another personal outcome from this project was learning how the design process can change once you have an accessible and universal design perspective in mind, which is a concept that wasn’t so clear in digital products for me.
