E-COMMERCE DESIGN
Overview
Bringing personalisation and fun to your car.
Carwaii was designed for the anime fans of Sydney, who wanted to customise their cars with a cute accessory, that could be reused for years. What started off as a small idea eventually grew into a small business that would meet the needs of an international audience.
October 2023 - present
Graphics designer and co-business owner. Role included designing the Etsy and previously Shopify website's digital assets such as the logo, branding and hero banner.
Audience for this small business is people who are looking for anime-themed car accessories to personalise their vehicles.
Summary
The challenge
We needed to have graphics that would help us to differentiate our store against all the other competitors. We wanted to convey a 'cute' brand aesthetic, as kawaii means cute, but show that our products are related to car accessories.
The solution
I designed the graphic assets that could be used across our Etsy store, Shopify website and social media to communicate our brand. I initially started with Procreate but realised that it was better to create vector assets on Adobe Illustrator so that the quality would be maintained across different platforms.
The approach
Conducting competitor analysis across local and global markets
Although there were plenty of creators overseas, particularly in the US, the Australian market seemed to have opportunities considering there is a large local fan base.
Brainstorming and iterating upon designs
I tried out many different ideas for logos, colours and styles until I eventually reached a design that we were happy to use to represent Carwaii.
Creating high-quality vectors to be reused across our brand
I originally thought of sketching and creating in Procreate, but found it was not going to be a scalable solution. I quickly moved to Adobe Illustrator as it could produce vector graphics.
Conducting competitor analysis across local and global markets
I compiled a list of competitors from all over the world, and then zoomed in on a couple that were particularly well known in the US and also in Australia. Through this research, we were able to figure out our niche and determine a strategy that would help us to establish ourselves in the market.
Based on survey data and secondary research, we created two personas that we thought would be our primary target markets. In designing the branding and the story of our store, we kept these customers front of mind.
After looking through many different media and websites in search of inspiration, I sketched some initial ideas on paper. We compared the ideas and once we had decided to go with the car number plate route, I moved to Procreate as the medium for sketching.
Having decided a car number plate might not be personal enough for our brand, I experimented with the idea of having a cute mascot represent the face of the Carwaii brand.
Iterations of other graphics are available upon request
Creating high-quality vectors to be reused across our brand
After the original sketches were done, I began to create graphics in Adobe Illustrator instead as we found that having the ability to scale vectors and retain the quality of the designs was extremely important.
The main other things to be designed included the packaging, the website (previously we ran a Shopify store) and the Etsy store. Each graphic took at least a few iterations to redesign since the first few iterations didn't quite hit the mark.
Having learnt many things on this branding journey, there are things that I plan to redesign for Carwaii some day.
Having done this project helped me to improve in my skills of designing for multiple devices and platforms. I learnt how to create a Shopify store as well as an Etsy store, and both platforms required graphics to be resized accordingly. On top of that, the scaling had to be done right so that the graphics didn't appear awkwardly spaced when viewing on larger/smaller devices.
I experimented a lot with colour as I was designing. I wanted to communicate a fun, yet cute and personal brand with the colours that I chose. Originally, the colour palette consisted of a lot more neutral tones which somewhat washed out the personality of our brand. On the flip side, choosing darker colours took away the fun and light-hearted vibe that we wanted to portray.
Having reflected on the importance of brand symbolism for logo design especially, I am considering re-designing the logo in future to have it more explicitly tied to a car accessories brand. Although the mascot is cute and is in line with our aesthetic, it is not in line with our brand as a whole (at least, at face value) and it could be improved to convey the Carwaii brand better.
© Jennifer Kouch 2024 | UX Designer | jennifer.kouch888@gmail.com