Journey Map
Emblematic Product Prototype
Victoria’s Secret is a household brand for women’s lingerie and underwear, with large distinguishable storefronts and models called “angels”. Today, the brand has lost not only market share but brand identity as a go-to, “accessible-luxury”. This is attributed to a number of reasons including a reported drop in quality of their products as well as the brand “failing to be aligned with women’s evolving attitudes towards beauty, diversity, and inclusion”. On closer, personal inspection, the changing times seem to have pushed the large pink patterned displays in a more gaudy than sensual direction. An overflow of designs and categories add clutter to websites and shelves causing an inconsistent, messy customer experience. Victoria’s Secret’s inconsistent pricing, oversaturated inventory, and outdated ethos seems to clash with the smooth online experiences, already replacing brick-and-mortar establishments, as well as recent awareness for body positivity.
Our vision for revamping Victoria’s Secret can be segmented into the various categories of user experience. For physiopleasure, it is essential for Victoria’s Secret to return to the same level of quality that popularized their products in the first place. In particular, comfort and material quality is paramount in the undergarment market. Even so, product quality must also be supported by proper product presentation. Victoria’s Secret’s current inventory is massively overrun with infinite permutations of designs, categories, and collections which contribute to a distracted, viscerally exhausting experience. Though drastic, our proposed solution entails a complete overhaul, simplifying Victoria’s entire wardrobe into 5 styles of bra and underwear, respectively, with a single, changing feature style on a month by month basis. Our hope is that this would radically simplify physical and online storefronts. Specifically with regards to the website, which is the most important medium of sale in this day and age, we adjusted the overall design ethos from “gaudy pink and gold times new roman” to a more simple, minimal look to reflect the more simple, minimal lineup. In sum, this would facilitate a smooth experience from start to sale.
To improve consumer sociopleasure, Victoria’s Secret needs to embrace diversity in body shape, type, and defining beauty. We hope to accomplish this by making sure the marketing ethos and product selection as a whole are defined by comfort and practicality rather than sex appeal. From a marketing perspective, using product models of diverse body types and recruiting popular personalities online rather than supermodels expands the definition of beauty that is being advertised in a familiar, relatable way. Furthermore, we have prototyped a body visualizer tool on the product pages that will assist the customer in choosing a style and size that will complement the customer’s own specifications. We hope that this is both a practical tool as well as a reflection of an active effort to accommodate for all sizes and shapes so that customers will want to purchase Victoria’s Secret’s products to value signal diversity in beauty.
For ideopleasure, the redesign and rebrand will improve customer opinion and relationship with the brand. For example, the body visualizer tool provides an individualized experience, making the customer feel accepted and, eventually, loyal. Moreover, Victoria’s Secret should reinstate consistent pricing (ie: $40 for bras, $10 for underwear, and $60 for the feature) to gain customer trust. Victoria’s Secret already has brand recognition and if they can reengineer that into a new look and feel, the customer will furthermore enjoy being associated with the brand.
In terms of psychopleasure, the new website attempts to simplify the buying experience. The body visualizer and the ability to input individual information makes it easy for the user to see the product on a body very similar to their own, and it decreases the stress that comes with purchasing undergarments. The decrease in product options to five bras, five underwear, and one feature as well as the ability to specify the exact type of material and the exact color desired product makes navigating the website more simple, and reduces the chaos that often comes with trying to find a very specific style out of a multitude of options. Lastly, the consistency in both the styles and pricing simplify the experience of purchasing undergarments and make it less necessary to plan purchases around sales and style availability.
This group has done an excellent job re-designing past-its-prime Victoria’s Secret. I especially like how you reduced their offerings in order to focus on quality, emphasizing behavioral design principles. If you wanted to continue this project, I might suggest looking at a less photorealistic body for the customizable model. You do a great job emphasizing physiopleasure, too.
I love the idea of the 3D visualizer—I’ve seen a few other fashion/cosmetics companies using them on their websites before, but they’ve all been a lot more unrealistic and didn’t give as many options for adjusting variables (waist, hips, skin tone, etc.). Especially with lingerie, which is an extremely personal and body-image-heavy product, incorporating the visualizer seems like an awesome way to increase engagement and make users feel more connected to the brand. The only thing I’d suggest is to remove the exercise option—the number of hours that someone exercises per week doesn’t really say anything about their body shape. Are they weightlifting, running, or taking yoga classes? What is their nutrition like? It’s really hard for even health-dedicated products to track these variables, so eliminating it entirely would probably make more sense. I think Bitmoji actually does a pretty decent job at allowing the user to visually model their body type without specifying any of their eating/exercising habits, so it might be helpful to take a look at their idea and iterate on it!
I love your concept of embracing all kinds of body types. The body visualizer is a great idea that incorporates technology into the current website. I am interested in seeing something similar to this that provides more personalized clothing design. I’m not sure if people can decide if they want to buy the designs when looking at the visualizer alone. Models’ images often allow me to imagine how the clothes would look like in real life (although the images can be misleading and my imagined product is far from the real thing). Also, it might make more sense for this to be a separate brand from Victoria’s Secret to get a whole new marketing strategy.
I like the idea of featuring more inclusive body types and skin tones and the ability to see what the item would look like on someone with your skin tone and body type. However, the exercise button greatly concerns me. It goes against the anti-body shaming message and might make some people feel uncomfortable answering it. The current model also looks rather spooky. My other concern is that when I’m shopping online, my main worry is about how it will fit and feel on my body. Will it tell you what size to get, and will you know if it will fit on the tighter or looser side? Also, if they do not carry your size at all, will they be honest and tell you that? Or will they try to sell you the closest size which likely will be ill-fitting? I say this because there are so many different body types and measurements that no store would be able to carry individualized sizes that perfectly fit everyone, so it might be worth setting up a different lingerie store that takes your measurements and creates a product to that size specifications. Some companies are already doing similar things but I don’t know if a lingerie company has done that yet!
I think the 3d visualizer is an interesting idea and while I think it allows people to customize the”model” to look closer to their body shape, the visualizer model may not present or sell the products (bras and panties) better than real-life models. It is harder to relate to the digital model, and I wonder how much does the customization of body shape really affects the appearance of clothing on digital models?
I think customizing the VS product may transform this brand into another style. Since Victoria Secret is used to be known to be quite fashionable that has a lot of new collections each season. Therefore, the generalization of just the color and fabric may lose its essence of being attractive and stylish. If we are only given the choices of color and fabric, we could probably just go to the very basic store such as Uniqlo and get the bras at a very cheap price instead of $40. Also, underwear sometimes has underlying meanings of the fantasy of our idealized body shape. So I am not sure if after I see my body as a sad realization on the screen, I will enter the numbers of my weight or size in reality.
Victoria’s Secret needs a brand refresh to accommodate the size and shade diversity of the modern consumer, which you’ve managed to execute here. The company was once at the apex of consumer marketing, but that idealized body is now perceived as unattainable and highly alienating. The body visualizer is actually ingenious. Personally, I was struck by the mix of diversity yet simplicity. You have a slider that accommodates the global range of colors and shades. This adds an element of not just inclusion, but customization and personalization as well. As a user of this product, I feel that Victoria’s Secret was personally engineered for me. Even with the diversity of choices, the website still manages to feel clean and minimalist.
I think for styles, you could categorize those 5 options on the website as “everyday” or “basics,” but still maintain room for those sexier picks. Victoria’s Secret was always known for selling variety and sex, and I think you can maintain that visual identity while still being inclusive (definitely take notes from the Savage X Fenty and Agent Provocateur playbook for inspiration).
The glasses company Warby Parker has an online feature that lets you hold a credit card up to your face for sizing, and then allows you to “try on” glasses (kind of like a 3D Snapchat filter). Maybe some sort of size standardization item (many people in the US will have a card-sized item) can also help with the body visualization tool.
I second the comment about removing exercise as a criterion. Certain insurance services analyze online behavior with the potential to affect health services offered (this came up in news articles on China’s social credit system). Protection of user information would be important—it would be in Victoria’s Secret’s interest to keep track of customer data to cater better their products, but securing the website is key.
I love the idea of having a 3D Visualizer available to users. I think this really helps to solve the problem of shoppers not being convinced by models/text description to buy a product. Adding onto Wanxi’s point, it may not be enough though. One thing I might suggest is also providing 3-4 model shots that show the product in models of diverse race/size/ability. I think glossier does a great job of showing one product on models of all different races to demonstrate the versatility of the product https://www.glossier.com/products/generation-g . One can identify themselves with one or some combination of the models. OR Outdoor Voices integrates instagram/community shots of real people wearing and doing things in their apparel. https://www.outdoorvoices.com/products/doing-things-bra?variant=29720755142734 Those images circulate just above reviews. This might be a cool feature to add to create more sociopleasure/self- identification with your product.
I love love love the real AR model idea!! I don’t think I have seen anything like this on other websites. I hate it when I buy something that looks great on the model but not the same on myself. I loved the sliding bar idea. The site visuals, in general, (other than the models) were a bit simple and could be a little bit more exciting. Not as overwhelming as the original Victoria’s Secret website but a bit bolder. But that’s just my opinion cause I like color, the neutral tones are very in 🙂
Liking this a lot. I think the group did a great job identifying some of the shortfalls and weaknesses of the current victoria secret offering. I particularly like the idea of harmonising and streamlining the online portfolio and pricing.
To take this to the next level, I would love to understand what the team was thinking with regard to integrating the body visualiser into the smoothed product palette, in order not to compromise the goal of simplicity, yet placing int prominently enough to capture and sustain attention.
TH2020
As a VS consumer who’s often frustrated with the flashy pop-ups all over their website, I like the new take on Victoria’s Secret! I think you’ve acutely identified a possible cause of consumer alienation within VS’s traditional marketing. Jumping off our conversation in class, I’m wondering more about the specifics of the visualizer: I thought about allowing customers uploading their own images to craft a “personalized” visualizer, but I can see how that could very easily be misused for pornography without consent. Maybe you could base the visualizer on a humanoid character named “Victoria”? This could help the customers feel some sense of personal attachment to the brand.
I found this revamp to be very exciting and original. I really like the idea of a customizable model and would love to not only see it at victoria’s secret but also on other online stores. I do think it would be really cool if there would be some way to have the face customized as well.