Contacts and specs website
I began working with the owner of Contacts and Specs as a walk-in customer of his 20+ year old brick & mortar location in Chicago and was surprised to learn that he had no interest in doing any business online, simply based on the fact that he didn't believe anyone would be willing to buy high end glasses without trying them on as well as without his personal touch when educating them and fitting them on his customers. Those are the challenges I took on to prove wrong when we engaged into an agreement to do a inexpensive test with a simple online presence. This test proved to be a huge surprise that the owner never expected and immediately invested heavily into a full blown online department at his office and a full redesign for his online storefront to better represent his brand and in-store experience.
Tools used: Adobe Photoshop, Balsamiq Mockups 2, Basecamp, Yahoo Merchant Solutions
Website
When we originally began to work with this client, I was tasked with finding the easies and fastest way to launch an e-commerce store front that would work as a proof of concept. For that task, I thought that Yahoo Merchant solutions was the best option, due to their network of referral websites that would help a new site gain some much needed traffic. We quickly realized that a lot of their existing walk-in customers were very interested in using the site as a browsing catalog and that our primary focus should be on being able to quickly easily navigate through the different products. Since the first month of sales convinced the benefits of having an online store, the owner was ready to go all out and build a custom build e-commerce store you see online today that provides him the ability to properly advertise all of the unique brands he carries, as well as direct foot traffic to the two locations he has opened since, on top of exceptional sales worldwide.