Coach Mobile App

Summer 2019, I was an intern at Kate Spade. Kate Spade, Coach, and Stuart Weitzman are all owned by Tapestry. Tapestry had a case study competition for all its interns and I was placed in a team of six. My teammates and I, who had either a design or business background, were tasked with ideating a mobile app for Coach.

Why? Coach.com was seeing a huge jump in the number of mobile visitors, along with a huge increase in conversion rates through mobile. Many of their rival companies had already developed mobile apps to capitalize on convenience and open a new line of communication between customer and brand. Coach was also facing difficulties connecting to younger generations and wanted to change that. As a result, Coach was exploring the introduction of a mobile app for consumers to use at home and potentially in stores to enhance the Coach shopping experience.

Before working on the actual design, we needed to deepen our understanding of the target demographic: Generation Z. Luxury brands in general have long been associated with older people due to their high prices. Competitors such as Gucci managed to find ways to connect to younger people, but Coach had not.

Our research found that consumers under the age of 30 loved to shop online due to its convenience. Gen Z, in particular, was estimated to have a spending power of $143 billion. It was no wonder that Coach wanted to tap into that market, and the best way to do so was through mobile.

Through more research and interviewing younger Tapestry employees, we discovered other key insights on Gen Z:

Apps take up space in users' smartphones. There needed to be a good reason to download them, to use them over a company's mobile site. Offering tools that mobile sites didn't have, such as wish lists, were one reason. Incentives such as rewards were another (we suspected this was because Gen Z'ers didn't have a proper income and therefore jumped at any opportunity to save money). Lastly, despite shopping online so frequently, Gen Z'ers still liked to visit stores in person and expected interesting experiences there.

We created a Gen Z persona to tie all these findings together:

Gen Z clearly valued new and innovative technology. What sort of technology was out there, and how were they being used?

We researched technological trends and found that Augmented and Virtual Reality were growing rapidly, with 48% of shoppers saying they were more likely to shop at retailers that utilized them. Gucci, in fact, was using AR to allow customers to try on sneakers.

The reasoning behind this was because customers may hesitate to buy something online if they're unsure how it would look on them. We thought this was a great idea that didn't just need to be limited to shoes. Why not let users try on other items as well? We looked into the feasibility of that. AR required customers to use a camera, which could be tricky for trying on tops or bottoms. However, it was doable with VR, where customers could create an avatar that would wear the clothes for them.

Since Gen Z also cared for positive in-store experiences, we researched methods for Coach stores to use advanced technology. Image recognition tools were becoming increasingly popular because it can be extremely difficult to search something if the person has trouble describing it. This sort of convenience is the reason why Gen Z'ers value technology. We decided we could leverage this by having image recognition work with VR. An in-store customer could take a photo of an item they like and virtually try it on, saving them the time needed to find a fitting room and change. We also decided that image recognition can be used with wish lists. It's easy for customers to add an item they see in the mobile store to their wish list. It's harder when they see an item in real life, since they would then have to search for it digitally. With image recognition, instead of searching for an item they may not know the name of, they can just take a photo.

So VR and image recognition technology might capture Gen Z'ers initial attention, but trends don't last forever. How do we ensure that Gen Z'ers developed a real love for Coach? How do we maintain interest?

Our research found that offering tangible incentives was a huge reason why people downloaded and kept mobile apps. Coach products were not cheap and since most young people don't have a stable income, they may be deterred from making regular purchases. We found before that Gen Z'ers were crazy about rewards because they added more benefits to their purchases, in the form of discounts and other perks. We looked into how competitors set up their rewards system to build customer loyalty. I decided to also research non-shopping apps that had a rewards system in place and found myself most drawn to Snapchat's.

Snapchat trophies are organized into sets, with the trophies of each set building on one another. In this example, users win the star trophy by reaching a Snapchat score of 500. The next trophy in the set would be won by reaching an even higher score. I liked this idea because it encouraged users to do the same few actions Snapchat wanted them to do (in this case, keep sending Snaps). Coach could leverage this idea to encourage users to keeping spending, keep visiting stores, and more. This would also save Coach from needing to come up with many unique rewards.

Our final research phase focused on general eCommerce best practices for both experience and visuals. We analyzed the mobile apps of several other brands, such as Chanel, Nike, and Louis Vuitton.

We liked the cleanliness and big images, but Coach's app could definitely be more fun and interesting!

Based on our research, we decided to create an app that would:

1. Utilize VR and image recognition to allow customers to quickly try on products in/out of stores.

2. Utilize image recognition to also allow customers to add items to their wish list while in stores.

3. Utilize a rewards system to incentivize customers to keep using the app.

Once we formulated an idea, we created a flow chart to help us flesh out the details.

One of my teammates, Morgan Rossi, also drew some amazing sketches to help think of the app's appearance! She had a few ideas for navigation: we liked the top left best since the banners are eye-catching. She also drew what the VR could look like. We loved her idea of making the space where customers try on clothes look like a fitting room.

For further inspiration, we visited the recently opened Coach store in Hudson Yards, NYC, since that's the store design Coach is pushing forward. There's a large pink room in the store, so we decided to make pink a motif in the app. The store also has a customization lab that features a neon sign on a metal fence, so we made that a motif as well.

The app icon. The goggles are the "C" from Coach. They're a nod to the VR aspect of the app and symbolize viewing the world through Coach's eyes. The background is a peach color that Coach commonly uses for their products.

The shop page. We followed the eCommerce standard of organizing the products into different categories. The products are listed in a blog-like layout, as opposed to a standard grid, to make the page more visually interesting. Customers have the option to save items they like, as that was a feature considered to be very valuable. To add an item to the VR fitting room, they would tap on "Try On" in the product page. To access the fitting room, customers click on the hanger icon in the top right. All the items they marked as "Try On" are listed at the bottom. To try on an item, customers would simply tap on it. They can rotate their avatar, which they created while making an account and can edit anytime, to see how the item looks at multiple angles. From there, they can decide to add the item to their shopping bag and purchase, or discard.

To make the app usable in stores, we've included a camera where customers can take photos of products to try them on virtually or add to their wish list. After taking a photo, customers can either tap the hanger icon to directly go to the fitting room with the product, or the save icon to save the product to their wish list. After saving the product, they have the option to view their wish list.

Your profile page is where you can edit your avatar and view your saved posts. You can also view your rewards. We created a rewards system where customers can win the Coach charms that are used for customization. Following Snapchat's design, there are different sets of charms, where each charm builds off of each other. For example, to unlock the Black Tea Rose, customers would need to spend over $100. To unlock the Blue Tea Rose, customers would need to spend over $500, and to unlock the Purple Tea Rose, a $1000. Each reward would offer a discount or access to an event or sale. This would incentivize customers to keep using the app.

Responses from the judges were positive. They found our design to be creative and innovative.

This was my first time designing a mobile app, and for a large company. I was pushed to think bigger and smaller at the same time: I had to come up with innovative ideas while keeping in mind that a phone screen is tiny. It was a new experience that helped me grow greatly. If I were to redo it, I would test the design with users to see how they respond.