Ixora Apparel

Ixora was an apparel brand that designed beautiful, custom-made pieces for each and every woman. With goals to decrease waste, promote body-positivity, and reduce consumption, Ixora aimed to be a company where women not only looked good, they’d feel good too with resources to develop their careers and give back to underrepresented communities.

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Challenges

Saturated Industry

In a very competitive and saturated industry, what was the best way to tell Ixora’s story through an engaging and attractive user experience?

Pivoted Business Plan

Originally a made-to-measure site exclusively for jackets, Ixora planned to expand to include other apparel. Yet, a core question remained: what was the most effective way to show a consistent customization experience across different clothing items?

Solution

Side-by-side Design

Instead of promoting the blog or apparel over the other, they were paired side-by-side to create an equal emphasis on the pairing of mind and body. In an industry where millennial-targeted boutiques pop up all the time, consumers may come for the trends but stay for the advice.

Expanding the Customization Process

Creating a customization process that ensures accuracy was tricky in order to create a consistent, intuitive user experience. Paired with Ixora’s concurrent cost research for materials and labor, this feature was constantly being reexamined to balance ease-of-use with made-to-measure.

Result

Ixora launched but the founders decided to stop pursuing the startup after two years due to rising distribution costs.

Ixora was focused on building a mailing list for future marketing purposes as well as building an online presence with blog posts detailing Ixora’s journey and tips for being an entrepreneur. Once the shop launched, the main metrics to analyze were conversion rates for both purchasing and signing up for the email lists (i.e. New Arrivals/Discounts vs. Blog Updates) as well as bounce rates. By observing these data points, the respective user flows could be modified to improve the user experience, e.g. offering more discounts via email and social media posts, simplifying the customization process, or modifying the word count and layout of blog posts.