Stitch Fix is a personal style service that evolves with its customers’ tastes, needs, and lifestyles. Stitch Fix hired us to help them launch two Style Guides: one for women, one for men. These Style Guides are fashion blogs that provide fashion advice for customers and non-customers alike. Although the Guides gently encourage readers to get a “fix” (place an order for a customized delivery of clothes), the content of the Style Guides is open for the enjoyment and education of all visitors. Visitors are also able to reach out to a stylist with specific questions; some of these questions and answers are then developed into future blog posts.
The first version of the Style Guides needed both a brand update and an updated Ask A Stylist editorial flow. The Stitch Fix team asked us to update the general experience of the site for both visitors and for the internal content and stylist teams.
Visitors can use the Style Guide to ask Stitch Fix stylists for specific tips and advice. The Stitch Fix team asked for our help in improving the response time to these questions; they had been manually managing the process with a spreadsheet, and response times were approximately 2 weeks. We implemented an improved workflow using Zendesk and WordPress, reducing stylist response times to less than 48 hours.
In this updated workflow, the content and editorial staff assigned each incoming reader question to a member of the stylist team as a ticket in Zendesk. The stylist was then able to send a response to the question as a private email message to the reader who sent in the question. That response was then automatically sent back to WordPress and put into a draft blog post, which the team could either archive or publish to the site as a new post, adding custom photos.
After we removed the barriers to publishing content to the site, the internal team was able to update the site more frequently, and with the influx of fresh content, the site traffic grew. We also replaced the legacy Wordpress comment system with a Facebook-enabled comment system for increased engagement with Stitch Fix’s large Facebook following.
The Flickerbox design team explored options for showcasing the content, in particular all of the imagery. We developed wireframes to explore options around how to best support such an image-heavy site, which included large online galleries and blog posts with multiple photos. The internal design team at Stitch Fix handled the visual design work. We then facilitated the handoff of that design work to the Flickerbox development team. Our goal was to support the brand while keeping the focus on the content.
A few months after the launch the Flickerbox team designed the second version of the Ask a Stylist page. The updated design needed to achieve multiple goals: it had to remain simple for visitors to submit questions, but we also wanted to make it easier for readers to both see existing popular answers and to search for past answers by topic.
Collaborating with the Stitch Fix team, we quickly grasped their workflow and needs and created opportunities to improve the overall experience of the Style Guide for both the internal team and for website visitors. Shortly after the launch of the Style Guides, there was a large increase in site traffic and requests for “fixes.”