PUBLISHING SOFTWARE
Most of Catalog Spree's retail partners only publish three or four catalogs a year. We needed a way to create original digital content for the Catalog Spree App to keep users engaged and coming back to the app more frequently. How can we get established retailer's product into a digital "catalog" experience for our users? Spree Studio was the brainchild of CEO, Joaquin Ruiz and CTO, Owen Williams.
My Role
Senior UX Designer
The Method
Partnering with the Chief Technology Officer, I spent twelve months designing and developing a digital publishing software. This software consisted of two parts: content pulled from retail websites into product collections and catalog templates to display this content for users. The collection side was a simple cache of product images pulled from any retailer website with an open API and category creator to organize these products into "collections" to be dropped into the catalog template on the layout side. The design side of Spree Studio was modeled on the premise of existing programs like Adobe InDesign and Sketch, with a designer's wishlist of capabilities from drawing shapes to aligning objects and even the ability to undo anything.
Coding and visual aspects of the software were solely done by the CTO with my input on usability and flexibility of designing within the program.
The Result
A publishing software that designers and non-designers could use to create product collections, design templates and publish catalogs/lookbooks in a matter of minutes. The first "Spree book" we published was Forever 21, with over 60 pages of content from a retailer that had never had a traditional print catalog. User engagement was through the roof and unprecidented for such a large catalog.
Spree Studio created a pivotal change for Catalog Spree as a company and opened opportunities for revenue, new users and eventually the acquisition of the company in 2014.
