2018 A Year in Fashion with Lyst
Lyst is a global fashion search engine and ecommerce destination that is revolutionising the way people shop for fashion. In 2018, 80 million shoppers, across 120 countries started their fashion search with Lyst. That’s over 100 million searches tracked by Lyst for trends, brands and fashion products. Combined with sales data and social media mentions, Lyst’s data is the definitive source of what was hot in fashion for 2018.
Our brief
Each year Lyst releases their Year in Fashion, which blends their wealth of data with real world events throughout the year to reveal our most wanted fashion items, and the moments that got us searching for them.
Our brief was to take this mountain of data and consolidate it into one single page where readers could discover a whole year’s worth of trend setting (and following).
Identity meets simplicity
The client was keen for the Year in Fashion 2018 to have its own identity, so we were able to be playful and animate a brand mark on page load to give impact to the campaign. This mark was then translated across press and social channels, giving the campaign an identity in its own right.
With a whole host of information to display, from Celebrity influencers to Instagram’s most wanted, the page was at risk of becoming a never ending scroll. By using horizontal scrolling for each category, we were able to compress the height of the page and allow users to scroll vertically until a topic caught their attention. With so much content, the body of the UI design was crafted to be simple and slick, allowing the content to stand out.
Working with great content partners always helps in designing best—in—class experiences. With Lyst we were lucky to benefit from their partnership with Adam Katz Sinding, a fashion street photographer. His folio of images blend interesting angles and crops with lively street scenes to separate the content from traditional product cutouts to dynamic lifestyle shots.
We loved working with the team at Maido. They stuck to the brief, developing a strong creative solution as well as providing alterations along the way, nothing was ever too much trouble. They project managed the campaign brilliantly and overcame unexpected issues with great communication throughout. We were thrilled with the results, they gave the campaign it's own identity and it was our most successful to date.
Optimising performance
Developing the page was fun and simplified by our decision to build it with React. We had to support static HTML file creation for multiple languages using a single 'template' with reusable interactive elements; this was a great partnership between server—rendering dynamic content for React from Node and creating layouts and content depending on what we wanted to show for each section.
We were also able to use a number of tried and tested React libraries to assist us in fast development and rapid prototyping.
There’s a lot of images on the page, which are a killer for web performance, so with some custom Node scripts we cached, compiled and optimised the page in each of its 5 languages to be extra performant and visually appealing.
Results
Launching in early November last year, coverage for 2018’s Year in Fashion has exceeded the previous years annual results within the first 2 months, more than doubling the coverage targets set by the Lyst team.
With over 200 pieces of coverage and counting, highlights include the BBC, Mail Online, Forbes, Financial Times, Hypebeast, Vogue UK, Buzzfeed, Refinery 29, Wired and Quartz.
For us here at Maido, these results are evidence of what a tight team of designers, developers, project managers, and a fantastic client, can achieve in a short time span working as one team towards a shared goal.