Concepts x Nike

THE CHALLENGE:

The explosion of the sneaker industry in the last few years is not unknown to anyone and one of the fastest growing trends has undoubtedly been collaborations. So we were particularly excited when Concepts approached us to work with them on a project to design a themed ecommerce store all about the Woodstock to promote and sell their three, limited edition remixes of the legendary Nike Air Max. Three separate drops over the course of a month.

That meant three separate websites for three separate shoes and subsequent apparel collections. And we had just under two months to do it.

Oh, and we were told that the last collab they did sold out in approximately 5 mins - so, no pressure.

Getting Started

It was made clear to us from the start that this site had to be immersive and capture the sense of woodstock. Cue many hours on YouTube watching old footage, scouring Pinterest for old 60’s music posters and of course, the obligatory burning of Patchouli incense while conducting research.

We presented three separate concepts each taking a slightly different approach to the eclectic and psychedelic period that was the late 60’s. The route that was chosen was also our favorite, the original Woodstock festival poster as the inspiration for the whole site.

Ecommerce and Design

The design hinged around two main elements, typography and patterns. We selected a number of typefaces that represented the period perfectly, but wanted to find a way to get them to appear in a variety of sizes in each paragraph giving the unique feel present on posters – this meant some pretty intensive CSS and JS from our resilient development team.

In the 60’s color and pattern was everywhere, so we knew that it had to feature heavily on the site. In fact the website ended up with little to no plain or white elements anywhere. Colors and prints collided which again meant another challenge for the dev team, ensuring when the crowds descended on the day of launch, they weren’t slowed down by weighty page speed.

The result was a spectacular, rich kaleidoscope of styles which captured the essence of the period completely.

Three Stores, Three Looks

In addition to the initial store design, we had to build everything so duplicate stores could be made effortlessly and updated to reflect the look of each sneaker launch.

Using Shopify plus made this process significantly easier and three stores all launched on time, each bearing a completely different look and feel throughout, right down to the digital cartoon ‘stickers’ emblazoned on the pages.

One of the other key components was to build in a feature to ensure bots were unable to jump in early and buy up everything, so we developed a simple system to allow only one pair per customer.