Business Problem

Levi Strauss & Co are renowned for their denims. They’re crafted with care, using quality materials grown and stitched together, and “made to last.” But what do you do with the old, stained denim? What happens when those jeans don’t fit in anymore? Where do they go when they’ve been forgotten and out of style? Even with the recycling efforts today, 10 million tonnes of textile waste still ends up in a landfill every year in the United States alone.

opportunity - levi’s long year program

INSIGHTS + opportunity

Levi’s has been collaborating with sustainable companies such as Re/Done and I:Collect to reduce textile landfills. The company has collected used denims from customers to create new denim products to become another sustainable company. However, my team and I found out that even with Levi’s efforts on creating ethical company, most of customers (97%) did not know about their recycling program that has been served for years.

How we are Measuring Success

Visual language and identity

My role for this project was visual director and user experience designer. I have made design choices in the boundary of Levi’s style guide to keep the consistency, and have decided to make the flow clear and informative for the website visitors. The voice of the content are meant to relate customers to their own denim products, to emphasize their products, and to make right decisions for their old products that might be part of textile landfill problem.

Initial Low to medium Fidelity mockups

The progress of creating low to medium fidelity mockups was very fun and interesting to consider about the customers’ engagements. During this progress, I focused a lot on the customers’ experience and a draft of visual direction details we had to consider to keep the company’s identity

Testing Prototypes

My team and I created an initial prototype and tested it with 4 different Levi’s customers whom had either little to extensive experience with recycling programs.

After the test, the insights we gained helped us to improve narrowing the problem down more on each prototypes and cleared our assumptions. The initial structure and prototype we created was hard to find the information needed even thought we thought we have leveraged all information to the front.

So I extended my research on other competitors who are fronting their ethical and sustainable views of their companies to create better visual directions and clear user experience with interfaces.

Sitemap

After testing, we overhauled the structure of our pages and customer journey. We reevaluated what would matter most to customers, and decided as a team that it was a better experience to allow customers to explore at their own pace.

BIG PROBLEM & BRIEF SOLUTION

Information of the context of the issue and solution that is brief and direct. Customers who are inclined to donate want to validate that Levi's is aware of the situation and what they offer.

MAP & CURATED STORIES

Addressing where and how the initiative has made an impact in the world through curated stories. Knowing where the donation is repurposed allows customers to trust the client more.

Re/Done & I:COLLECT PARTNERS

Ensuring that content is upfront and useful for the customer. We want to answer their most important questions, what is the program, who is involved, and where do donations.

PROVIDING CONTEXT THROUGH STORYTELLING

The solution provides the customer with a story in which they can relate to personally. This would empower Levi’s goals while customers can understand the whole process of Levi’s recycling process at the same time

SIMPLE LEADING STEPS FOR CUSTOMERS

This quick and short information is provided for customers who have been wondering about the sustainable program by Levi’s. We put this step after detailed information to target customers’ curiosity to be part of the program.

Reflection

The experience of working on this project has taught me the power of the interaction between storytelling and visuals to create an impact. This project had a hail of different values and contents we would like to share to Levi’s customers, since they could have leveraged existing programs and hidden stories that could be so valuable for audiences.

This gave us a chance to turn the challenge into an opportunity. By focusing heavy content and topic of global issues towards a journey of jeans with storytelling, it led us to approach audiences more easily. From this, I learnt that rather than trying to hide serious or heavy topics, we can shorten that content with honesty and clear thoughts. In so doing, we bring them up front and communicate with audiences which the viewers appreciate.