Designing Google digital products, branding, eCommerce, and campaigns

Bringing out KEEN’s brand personality was central to this project. It’s a company with a purpose, so its new eCommerce experience had to be similarly purpose-driven to reflect their brand. The site framework focuses on brand and audience connection through shared values and interests. This helps to bridge the gap between purpose and product through content and storytelling.

The new design language follows the site framework’s lead and carries the KEEN character throughout. Our work includes a new personality-driven design language highlighting bold imagery, graphic textures, and unexpected moments to drive the system, expressing KEEN’s brand promise and position, its products and offerings, and speaking the truth to KEEN’s employees and consumers. This was about making the experience human, and the way in which the site embraces this design pillar throughout the shopping journey is key.

The new platform provides brand fans with various paths to product and content based on their intended purpose, and does so in a manner that provides guidance through facilitated discovery. The navigation structure and architecture removes friction, and encourages users to get lost and explore the experiences provided by the digital platform.

Shopping utilities can be found throughout the website, ensuring the ‘path to purchase’ is an easy and differentiated experience. Collection pages were crafted to enable contextual shopping, and product detail pages enable rich storytelling and pertinent information.

The entire site is designed responsively with adaptations to the user journey across mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. Our goal was to provide the optimum browsing experience while maintaining the primary features and site content regardless of form factor.

We implemented a mobile specific navigation, simplified the filtering system, and replaced carousel clicks with swipe gestures. With this mobile-first approach, we were able to streamline the browsing and shopping experience for brand fans and active outdoor enthusiasts who are constantly on-the-go.

Men, women, kids, work - the new site reflects the KEEN character across all product categories. Think of the brand as a tribe and its categories the individuals within the tribe. The platform treats category pages as home pages, empowering each category to tell the broader KEEN story while expressing individual positioning, personality, and product offerings.

While establishing the design language, we built through code. The new site is strategically built using a system of components, allowing the KEEN team to manage the components with ease. The custom experience manager not only shows its brand, marketing, and eCommerce teams how to use, interact, and edit the site components and code, but it also enables them to build out custom pages for integrators to deploy on Commerce Cloud (Demandware). This solution leads to better collaboration between all teams, and drastically increases time to market.

Our intention from the start was to set-up a relationship that focused on close collaboration between KEEN, the system integrators, and our agency. Our process of weekly sprints and frequent visits ensured the collaboration went smoothly. This allowed us to make decisions quicker, keep everyone informed throughout the process, and manage accountability on all fronts.