I led a 360 marketing campaign collaborating with an influential tastemaker in designing a brand new eyewear product.
JINS is a fashion eyewear brand offering prescription glasses with functional design.
Located in San Francisco with 6 stores in CA and over 609 stores globally (Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines).
1 year merchandising cycle, 2 months go-to-market
As a fairly new brand in the US market at the time, JINS was looking to grow their audience and build awareness. Recent monthly sales targets weren’t reached and revenue growth was stagnant. JINS also wanted to explore their influencer marketing program more in a new creative way. I started the "JINS Designed By" program as a vehicle to help unlock influential tastemakers potential to design exciting new eyewear collections.
The goal of this project was to create a design collaboration campaign that builds brand awareness, increases referrals, and increases revenue.
What is Functional Eyewear? It’s glasses that provide convenience, simplicity and innovation. This is a core value proposition that makes JINS competitive in the eyewear vertical. However, we observed JINS still wasn’t able to attract and convert customers, which was causing stagnant revenue growth to the business.
A tight go-to-market timeline due to aligning with summer season
With a lean team, we had to balance and optimize work load
Product design and manufacturing phases of the merchandising cycle
We started with finding out who our target audience was. From existing customer data, we found an interesting theme that Male Millennials were rising in the past year. With understanding our core ethnicity demographic as Asian, we moved forward with a target audience of Asian Millennial Male for this collaboration. It helped in finding the best influencer as well as understanding the end user for the newly designed product.
It was important to understand our product performance to uncover what category would be best for this design collaboration. I worked with our Merchandising Director and Ecommerce Head on gathering product sales data.
We wanted to understand what type of product was best performing since the last year. Our data revealed that JINS Switch (magnetic glasses and sunglasses in one). was the top performer. From these findings, we proceeded to focus on this type of product for the collaboration.
Further research from our Ecommerce team was conducted to investigate what existing customer pain points were from past customer reviews.
We found out key areas to focus on for the new product design:
Working closely with Wes, our VP of Marketing and the Japan product design team, they used the product research as well as their own data to help drive exploration of different materials, shapes, and pieces. I helped mainly with the project management side to ensure everyone was aligned and kept communication streamlined.
All phases of the marketing were important in ensuring a successful launch of the new product to our customers. Our goal was to launch on all channels that aligned with our target audience. I led the planning and execution of each area, leading our Marketing team: Graphic Designer, Social Media Manager, Communications Director, with our VP of Marketing overseeing.
On Ecommerce, I spearheaded the art direction of the landing page, homepage, and product detail page. I worked closely with our Merchandising Director, Ecommerce Head, and Graphic Designer on launching these elements.
Collaborating with Wes on the art direction, we brought his vision to life in a photoshoot. I led the production and ensured the new JINS Switch product was highlighted the best on-set.
To personify the EYE Frame’s clean and minimal style, we produced imagery to convey the product’s main theme. Angular elements of the background setting mimic the frame’s shape on it’s temple arms. Using a play on shadow and light, clean lines, and the model’s robotic-like demeanor, helped to put main focus on the eyewear.
I art directed and collaborated with product photographers to create the stylized tabletop shoot. We had Wes on FaceTime to ensure his vision was executed beautifully! To remain consistent to the minimalistic style, we translated the same theme from the model shoot into the product photography with muted tones and crisp lighting.
For the live website, click below:
EYE Frame, after it’s first year of launch, drove 10% of total revenue.
The EYE Frame campaign helped JINS explore influencer marketing and connect with their target market. It allowed the brand to reach a wider audience and highlight their core value proposition of offering highly functional eyewear.
Areas of opportunity would be especially in the research phase, I wished we were able to conduct 1:1 customer interviews to nail down what type of products they were interested in. However, with Wesley's strong vision and immense expertise by our Product Design Team, we were able to create a wonderful product. I also hoped we were able to A/B test the landing page, which I think would've helped more with optimizing conversion.
Overall, it was an amazing experience getting to collaborate with such a creative visionary like Wes. And we got to further enhance the JINS customer experience with an engaging and impactful product.
