Duration: 1 Month - Ongoing
Turtle Fur, a 42-year-old brand renowned for its outdoor headwear and accessories, recently underwent a significant rebranding, including an evolved logo, colors, and typography. With deep roots in Vermont and a legacy in skiing, the company aims to modernize and expand its appeal beyond regional relevance. Their product catalog, primarily consisting of winter hats, neck warmers, and other accessories, features a diverse range of SKUs with different materials and weights. They also plan to migrate to Shopify Plus to leverage some of the advanced features.
Turtle Fur faces the challenge of effectively communicating their brand values and product differentiations in a digital space. Their current website does not adequately reflect the high quality and feel of their product’s materials, and the navigation and filtering systems are inefficient. With a desire to streamline the shopping experience and better showcase a widening product range, Turtle Fur aims to elevate their online presence to a more modern, user-friendly experience. Additionally, Turtle Fur seeks to attract a shifting audience and increase sales by improving the user journey, highlighting the uniqueness of their products & sustainable efforts, and ensuring brand consistency across all digital touchpoints.
The first goal for Turtle Fur’s site was to streamline navigation, ensuring users can easily find and explore products. The first proposal focuses on the header, exposing Level 2 categories directly instead of grouping them under broad Level 1 categories. This increases awareness of Turtle Fur's offerings at a glance, reduces clicks to reach product pages, and allows submenus to showcase more specific categories. Additionally, I proposed creating menus and content modules that visually expose categories with image thumbnails of bestsellers, helping customers understand lesser-known categories.
The second goal for Turtle Fur’s site was to integrate the new branding elements for a cohesive, modern, and engaging shopping experience. Creating a responsive, modular framework centered around brand storytelling and shopping allowed for a flexible content system, and will allow Turtle Fur to populate content-heavy pages like the homepage to ultimately drive higher brand awareness and conversion. The homepage was chosen as the concept page due to its strong visual expression of the brand.
The last goal was very specific to Turtle Fur’s need to showcase a wide spectrum of content - from the brand’s values to the product’s quality. During the initial briefing, Turtle Fur had placed a lot of emphasis on wanting to build and give back to their community - they are also a BCorp. Creating content modules that worked hard to not only tell the story behind their campaigns and philanthropic efforts, but also signify a distinct initiative that operates under the larger umbrella of Turtle Fur was going to be important.
While community is a high priority, Turtle Fur also wanted to emphasize the high-quality materials, feeling, and craftsmanship of their product - which can be challenging to communicate in a digital space. Injecting large, high quality imagery and video- whether it was on-model or macro shots of the materials used for each product- was leveraged in order to create compelling storytelling and better showcase the materials and fit of the product.
Turtle Fur & Elva
Kelly Quesnel
UI Support
Manny Berkal-Sarbit
UX Support
Jon Morris