Clemence Mountain

Clemence Mountain is a brand that bridges the gap for women in the outdoor recreational category between form and function. Their products allow the customer to own gear that is not only great for hiking, fishing, skiing, and more, but also great to wear around town and, more generally, out and about. In order to convey this in the design, I looked at two brands that represent either side of the bridge they are looking to build: Zara and Arcteryx.

For Zara's online presence, they approached it utilizing an ultra-minimalistic design utilizing a lot of negative space and minimal contextual prompts. This practice allows for an element of mystique to present itself as well as an emphasis on the fashion aspects of their brand. Further, their catalog sections emphasized that point by extremely centering the products and maximizing negative space yet again. Arcteryx, on the other hand, utilized a lot more imagery of where you might utilize their products over images of models or clothing. Their catalog pages does utilize a bit more negative space, but the emphasis remains on the technical aspects of their products and where you might use them.

Utilizing this information, I decided that Clemence mountain should take a similar minimalistic approach (albeit not to the same degree as Zara) while also highlighting the aspirational nature of their customers utlizing the gear in outdoor recreation by showcasing outdoor environments where the products could be used.

Within each product page, the user is offered the opportunity to view what the clothing looks like on someone other than a model as well as a testimony to its usefulness. This helps the customer to have a deeper connection with both the brand as well as the product itself. If people are curious to learn more about what people thought of the product, a word cloud of popular phrases from reviews is available for people to quickly scan or delve deeper into full reviews.

Outside of the products, we also created our brand extension called "The Mountain" which is the brand's moodboard and blog. This allows our customers to see where our designers get their inspiration as well as receive information about stuff that is tangentially related to the brand. The idea behind this is to increase our engagement and connection with customers who may not purchase products regularly in order to keep them "in the fold."

The overall design of the site, while relatively simplistic and straightforward, emphasizes the importance of adventure and fashion when it comes to Clemence Mountain's apparel. The product always remains the most important thing to look at, but we provide the same level of aspirational imagery to encourage our customers to fully utilize our products.

I am extremely proud with how Clemence Mountain came together; this was a project that was completed extremely quickly with a team that had never met one another and was spread out across the country. In the end, we created a product that could exist beyond a simple start-up bootcamp.

Something I was reminded of while designing with this group was remembering who we are designing for. We aren't simply making pretty pictures or a basic website, we are trying to create a product that engages our potential customers and, hopefully, turns them into returning buyers. But it's easy to lose sight and simply do something because it looks cool, so don't lose sight of what you're trying to accomplish.

I do realize that it's a bit highfalutin to say that in making a website for luxury outdoor apparel it is imperative to only focus on the user rather than just a pretty picture, but damn it's true.

Many thanks to the Clemence Mountain team for this opportunity to work on this project. And thanks to Emma, for giving me the chance to do this.