CREATIVE DIRECTION, BRAND DESIGN, VOICE AND COPY DIRECTION, TEAM CREATIVE LEAD
Situation:
OpenSky was looking for creative leadership to support their pivot from B to C tool to guided commerce platform in 2010. This shift would focus on personality based, curated content shops with focuses on cooking, lifestyle and fashion categories.
The rooster of talent behind the curated shops included Rachel Ray, Veronica Webb, Tom Colicchio and Bobby Flay. The question would be if the world was ready for reality shopping.
Task:
My challenge was to create a compelling tool kit of brand elements, photo approaches and UX that would help support curators and make for a customer first, assisted selling/ personal shopper vibe.
Action:
The jumping off point of taste makers and their "collections" and framing these grouping was a stylistic element was key.
The brand spirit was grounded in optimism, energy, vibrancy and most importantly discovery. The play on the meaning of sky came out of conversations with the founders on core values and how to translate that in the design.
The typography combinations came from looking at elements that could be mixed to allow for utilitarian neutrality mixed with accents of individuality.
Prototypes were developed for a multivariate test and learn oriented approaches.
Results:
OpenSky used this tool kit to launch grow their foundation. They were acquired by Alibaba and have since pivoted back to the variation of their prior model of a general marketplace approach.
Although the brand shifted back to a more generic ubiquitous identity presentation commerce trends have shifted more toward a personality driven models and identity oriented clientelling. The version of OpenSky build on persona was ahead of its time.