- Logo design
- Typography
- Visual identity
- UI design
- UX design
- Website development
- Custom-built website functionalities
- Packaging design
An eCommerce retailer of mystery football shirts, Surprise Shirts started in 2020 as the small business venture of then 16 year old Louis Jones, but has since blossomed into a main player in this growing industry. The brand’s primary offering is a surprise purchase from a vast selection of football shirts from nearly any professional football team in the world, which is available as a one time purchase, 3 month gift purchase, or as a monthly subscription - but they also have other products related to the world of football too.
Upon growing to a level they never imagined, the Surprise Shirts team opted to inquire in our help for a full brand uplift and the development of an all new Shopify website ripe with personalised features, which would improve the experience for customers overall.
The goal for Surprise Shirts’ brand uplift was not to directly drive sales for their business, as they were doing a great job on marketing their brand already, but to make the customer experience as entertaining as possible, and encourage repeat purchases from existing customers.
The Challenge
Understanding what the brand wanted
From a visual perspective, whilst Surprise Shirts had some small graphical devices for us to build off of, they almost entirely viewed their existing branding as a stepping stone to get to a more professional brand suite. This meant that we would largely be allowed to take the brand’s visual identity in whatever direction we thought would best serve both the brand and their customers.
From the get go, Surprise Shirts highlighted some stand out visual elements that they were a fan of from across a number of different businesses, including their direct competitors and from businesses across the larger sports world. Whilst we wanted to bring as many of these elements as possible into the branding, we had to be careful not to make the finished look too busy, or to include elements that clashed with one another.
Unique functionalities
Surprise Shirts is unlike your conventional eCommerce store, in that none of the shirts within their primary product portfolio are available for direct purchase, only as part of a mystery box. This meant that we needed to figure out a way to display the shirts as products, without allowing a customer to check them out.
This had previously been achieved through Surprise Shirts’ “gallery” functionality, which had allowed them to display all of the shirts they had on offer. However, this functionality was clunky and had plenty of room for optimisation, which was room we were more than willing to fill.
- Brand uplift
- Visual Identity
- Website development
- Custom-built website functionalities
The Solution
A brand suite that scores big
As stated before, with the exception of wanting to maintain the look of the original Surprise Shirts logo, our design team were able to take Surprise Shirts’ brand suite in a number of different directions.
Surprise Shirts are all about bringing excitement and energy to the world of football merchandise, and so we worked on a brand suite that would reflect this.
We created a number of different variations for Surprise Shirts to choose from, with colour palette being the large differentiator.
The uplifted Surprise Shirts logo has a responsive layout, allowing it to be more versatile for any given space. This responsiveness allows the logo to scale for all applications, giving it maximum impact wherever it is placed.
The colour palette Surprise Shirts eventually decided on was heavily influenced by the Premier League, who primarily uses purple and white in their branding. Building upon this, we further built out the colour palette to make it more eCommerce friendly by implementing contrasting blues and greens.
Such a versatile colour palette meant that there would be space for Surprise Shirts to play around with combinations and gradients. We also gave them a number of primary colour combinations that should be used first, whilst letting them create others if they felt it necessary.
The two typefaces we decided upon were Akhand and Mundial. Both typefaces are web-friendly, highly legible, and capture the essence of the brand. They also both have a wide spectrum of weights, making them versatile for different applications and creating a clear hierarchy. Leading from this, utilising shapes from the new logo’s symbol and the brand patterns as graphical elements, we created additional visual interest throughout the site too.
Finally, we took on the additional task of redesigning Surprise Shirts’ packaging so that it was in line with this all new brand suite.
A league-winning site
Taking full advantage of that room for optimisation in the “gallery,” not only did we build out this section to have a much more streamlined design and text hierarchy, but we implemented the locker functionality that the brand had been so high on. The locker is essentially a wishlist functionality with a football branded twist. Whereas a typical wishlist functionality would list the products you’d want to purchase in your own time, with the mystery subscription nature of the product, the locker instead allowed customers to list shirts they would like to receive in the future.
By looking into the locker of each customer, Surprise Shirts had an easy way to boost customer satisfaction, by sending customers a shirt within their wishlist or one similar. Additionally, we added a football branded spin, where customers can “hang up” the shirts within their locker once they have received them.
Finally, Surprise Shirts’ subscription platform, Recharge, typically enforces its own front-end design onto a site. But, with how much care was put into the new site’s branding, this felt like a step down. And so, we made especially careful to integrate the new branding here too, building out our own front end display to take the place of Recharge’s.
The Outcome
Through the skilled work of both our design and development team’s Surprise Shirts now have an all new website that’s perfectly suited for their growing customer base. With an established marketing presence, this new brand house will allow Surprise Shirts to scale their business and position themselves as the brand to beat in this industry.
Want us to build a site for your eCommerce brand? Let’s talk!
Every great relationship starts with a conversation. We’d love to talk with you about your next project and answer any questions you might have about Shopify. But be warned… once we get talking about this stuff, it’s hard to shut us up!
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