Changing perceptions at SearsStyle

Synopsis

I designed weekly fashion marketing content for the SearsStyle blog, a subbrand of Sears.

Details

Team: SearsStyle

Role: Visual designer

Skils: Photography, photo compositing, illustration, typography, visual design, marketing design

Business problem:

Sears wanted more clothing sales

Sears is a department store started over 100 years ago in the 1890s. Sears became famous for it’s large catalog featuring home appliances and other wares. The corporation created SearsStyle, a sub brand meant to increase consideration of young women to see Sears as a trendy brand.

In 2013 I joined the SearsStyle team, a team dedicated to creating editorial fashion content made to feature collections and highlight trends.

Process

The brief

Designers would meet with the marketing team to review the week’s theme, products to be featured, and high level art direction.

Mood boarding

Once I received my week’s theme, I would create mood boards that highlighted color schemes, patterns, typography lockups, and other elements I would use to make a cohesive design.

Photography

Most of the time we were sent links to our live site product pages that featured the clothing for sale and we would have to inspect element, save the medium resolution product photos that were usually on grey backgrounds, then painstakingly select each item and model from the background before we could begin using them for creative. This often took hours.

On a few occasions I art directed and photographed employees that acted as models for the outfits and used this in my creative.

Bejeweled issue

Winter 2012

Fashion Week Issue

Winter 2012

Golden rules Issue

Winter 2012

Mint issue

Spring 2013

The SearsStyle team was quite scrappy. We rarely received photographs of models wearing an entire outfit that we wanted to showcase, so for this article, I volunteered to photograph our project manager who modeled the clothing in our office.