During my final 4 years living in China, I had the opportunity to join a bold, innovative, and architecturally inspired international footwear brand co-owned by Rem D. Koolhaas (nephew of the renowned architect, Rem Koolhaas) and the heir to the Clark’s Shoes empire, Galahad Clark.
In late 2010, I started working for United Nude as a UX designer in their Headquarters, then based in downtown Guangzhou, China. The space housed the company’s main operational departments, as well as the in-house graphics team, product design team, and marketing team.
Working closely with Rem D. Koolhaas (Co-founder / Creative Director) and Frankie Sun (Art Director), I assisted with creating campaign design materials, editing product photography, setting up newsletters and helping out where possible. After the first 6 months, I was tasked with updating the website design for the upcoming season
Autumn/Winter 2011
The main goal was to present new campaign photography and redesign the site with a dark theme for winter. Given the brands’ dark concept retail stores and lightbox display walls, I saw this as an opportunity to introduce a boxed background effect for the product photos on the site.
After a successful website redesign and development (working closely with a development team based in The Netherlands), we quickly jumped into designing a series of newsletters and marketing materials using the seasons’ lifestyle shots to promote and drive traffic to the new website.
Now the winter season was well underway and we had well-executed marketing campaigns running, I was asked to help contribute to the photoshoot concept meetings for the next launch.
Spring/Summer 2012
The requirements were to create a concept within the light theme boundaries that were white on white, included models, and gave an absolute focus on the products themselves. below are a few initial ideas we tested in-house.
Before long it was time to start redesigning the site for the new season and bring the design back into the light theme.
While reviewing the previous design we found an opportunity for improvement with the product search feature, and after researching potential paths for adjustments I began to design out the search component to provide the customer with more helpful search criteria.
To illustrate and communicate the new search bar internally and to the development team, I created a presentation to walk through how a user would interact with the feature.
Along with the new search feature, there was a request from the sales team to make sure users could purchase products within no more than 2 clicks, anywhere on the site.
The solution was to provide a navigation system that allowed users to reach the product indexes from all areas of the website and to include product lists more consistently throughout the pages, presenting users with the ‘add to cart’ button much sooner in their engagement.
After the Spring Summer 2012 launch, I was promoted to UX Design Lead where I shifted gears from launching a new website every season to working on optimizing and improving the website based on analysis and research.
I was also responsible for planning marketing campaigns with the sales and marketing team, and working with the graphics team to ensure all deliverables were designed and published on time.
Moving into 2013, I began producing and presenting quarterly reports on the website, social, marketing, search, and newsletter analytics, and with each report, I would provide recommendations for optimizations based on the results I uncovered.
Some of the optimizations that I recommended and were ultimately implemented were turning bounce traffic from the 404 error page into conversions, using a newsletter signup call to action, adding an incentive for newsletter sign up forms and adding those incentives across the site.
We also added a series of slideshows throughout the website and eCommerce store to reinforce some of the companies key differentiators.
One of the biggest updates made to the site was an overhaul of the product details page, which included a redesign of the size, style, and color selectors which were accompanied by a quick tip feature to help new users with navigating the store.
I’m super grateful for my time spent working in the United Nude team from 2010 to 2014, the experiences I gained, knowledge acquired and friends made. it has had a lasting impact on both my professional and personal life, and I highly recommend working with United Nude, and checking out their products!
“Mark worked for United Nude in a role which required flexibility and a willingness to cover different area’s, he always brought something positive to the table. Mark made a solid contribution overall … he became a valued member of the business who we felt was more than capable of delivering very good value”
Laurence Mead / Managing Director @ United Nude
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