Banana Republic: Style Solved

In September 2019, Banana Republic approached the central Gap Inc. UX team with a request to help them center themselves as a men's styling destination. As the Senior UX Designer, I was tasked with strategizing and designing a set of experimental MVPs to understand when, where, and how BR could utilize its current resources to break into the world of men’s styling.

While the team did not pursue moving into the styling space, this work ultimately led to Gap UX becoming a core resource for the Strategic Growth Office, and was tasked with helping validate strategic growth opportunities.

Please note that numbers have been altered for confidentiality,

Role

Sr. UX Design

Case Study

The opportunity

Banana Republic has a large operational organization containing many sales associates, many of whom are looked at as semi-stylists by our customers, but has no way of utilizing this relationship to generate revenue or loyalty.

Stage 1: Empathize

To start the journey, we had to ask ourselves, “What do men* actually want?”

• How do they see their personal style impacting their personal lives?

• What do they want to accomplish through their appearance?

• Will they accept help or advice?

*Users who self-identify as men and have Banana Republic in their purchase consideration set.

Quantitative Takeaways

These research insights were gathered via a behavioral survey conducted of a screened audience. The surveys were conducted by the members of our internal Customer Insights & Research team members. Study goals and parameters were set as a team, while specific study design was handled by our CIR partners.

This was going to be a clear challenge—if almost no one thinks they have a problem, is there really an opportunity? The answer is “potentially”. Given that a majority (56%) of the potential male customers were open to styling, even if >1% of them believe they have a problem, if we could identify individuals overlapping between the 56% with interest and 33% who are exhibiting behaviors, we could study what value we could offer them.

Qualitative Takeaways

These research insights were gathered via a combination of surveys sent out to a screened audience, in-person interviews, and in-home visits.

The picture in my mind started to become a bit more clear here—there’s a desire for some level of change, but the desire for change is blocked by a fear of creative expression. This fear seems to inhibit the imagination of these individuals, and we as a company are doing a disservice to them by not even helping them cross that mental gap.

Stage 2: Conceptualize

Concepts

The idea behind testing this concept was to evaluate the level of comfort of a shopper with getting live styling advice from either an individual or group of stylists. In the test, participants were to shop in the store as part of a normal customer experience survey (note: we were aware of the sway in bias this would introduce in a test, however we were interested in establishing baseline desirability to calculate a minimum population of the assessable target market) and if they were to find something they wanted to try on, they would be taken to the fitting room as usual. Participants were then directed by a store associate to their fitting room where a poster inside advertised a styling service accessible via text.

We had two participants interact with the service without being prompted, which in a test of less than 10 individuals gave us some level of confidence to validate that there is some potential.

To interact with users, I posed as a stylist on the other end with a professional stylist from Banana Republic working alongside me to give users realtime feedback based on images they would send through.

For Stylist On-Call, we had participants selected by our research team interact with a pre-existing service moderated by a professional stylist. This enabled us to quickly get a deep understanding of the process that a real stylist goes through to establish rapport, understanding, and the development of an individual’s style beyond the capabilities of a non-trained individual. By understanding this process, it enabled us to map specific flows which would be highly beneficial and quick to solve in a fast paced environment like our retail stores.

For this test, we took the most divisive pant color we had on offer to several men who described themselves as having classic, laid-back style. These participants were typically conservative in their manner of dressing. The design of this experiment was to create several assets and prototypes that individuals would passively interact with both virtually and in a store environment. The participants were observed and interviewed about their experiences.

The experience designed put a series of men whose images we both photographed ourselves and collected online in front of our participants in order to test how showing men of different ethnicities and body types affected their perception of a style of clothing they would otherwise not have chosen to wear.

We found that all but one participant was surprised and delighted by seeing an individual who they could project their identities into, which enabled them to envision the clothing on themselves in a way they would otherwise not have been able to.

Next Steps

It was time for the project to come to a close, but my proposed next steps to leave for the next team to take were:

• Combine learnings from each experiment to create an end-to-end experience flow.

• Design a service in multiple divergent iterations based on key service activities.

• Test and validate service designs with customers.