What is it?
Dapper Crew is a clothing delivery service. Our personal shoppers delivers clothes to men for below the cost of retail. I started Dapper Crew after noticing the growing trend of men wanting to dress better. After interviewing hundreds of men, there were a variety of pain points that stood out when it came to shopping. First, they didn’t know where to start. Second, it was too time consuming. Finally, they believed it was expensive (spoiler alert: it’s not). Through Dapper Crew, my goal is to ease the apprehensions men have when it comes to dressing well.
My roles
As the founder of Dapper Crew, I have my hand in every piece of the business. I designed and created the website from scratch. I did this using WordPress and a variety of plugins. To promote the business, I’d reach out to potential clients on social media. Once the clients sign up, I shop for them and find them quality clothes at a discounted price. I then ship them their box of clothes and repeat the process whenever they request a new one. So far, I’ve served over 100 clients throughout the United States. My future goals are to continue expanding this service.
Identifying the problem and research
A few other clothing delivery services were popping up when I started Dapper Crew. I thought the concept of what they were doing was really cool and I knew there was a growing market of men who wanted to dress better. I decided this would be a worthwhile business venture and good opportunity to incorporate the UX design process I was learning. At the time, I was involved in an entrepreneurial group which, coincidentally, had a large amount of members that were trying out the other clothing delivery services. It honestly was a stroke of luck that I found them. I set up interviews with those guys asked them and what their experiences was like. From all the interviews, I gathered my notes and was able to realize the pain points that I would solve for. I quickly created paper prototypes that focused on alleviating these pain points and tested those with the group I interviewed. I got a ton of feedback that validated my design and I moved on to the next step of actually making the site.
Designing the platform
I’m not the greatest coder in the world so I knew that creating this site would be a challenge. Luckily I’m fairly resourceful and was able to make a “minimum usable product” on a platform called Unbounce. Another benefit of using Unbounce was that I was able to create multiple versions of the site and run A/B tests to see which ones would perform best. I kept this page for about 2 months and eventually settled on the page design that had the best conversion rates.
Nowadays, most of the enhancements I do to my site is driven by client feedback. After about a couple months of using my “minimum usable product”, I got a lot of feedback asking for Client Profile pages. Clients wanted a page to manage their own information so I created it for them. This wasn’t something I could do on Unbounce so I had to migrate the entire site over to WordPress. Having the site on WordPress has opened up the ability for a lot more functionality. Not only was I able to create the Client Profile pages but I was also able to create a Style Consultation and Order Box page by implementing a Typeform plugin into my site. Both of these things were previously handled via a phone call or email which was becoming quite cumbersome for me to do.
Marketing the service
Every successful business aims to limit costs. I didn’t want to spend all the revenue I was generating on expensive marketing tactics. I created a foundation of clients using a variety of guerrilla marketing techniques. I would often reach out to unhappy customers of other services on social media to offer our service. I would frequent fashion organizations and events to spread the word.
Incorporating user feedback
Since the launch of Dapper Crew, I’ve been collecting feedback from our clients through surveys. I ask my clients a variety of questions that help me figure out what feature they’d like to see at Dapper Crew.
Most recently, I’ve received an overwhelming amount of requests to create a mobile app so clients could more easily order boxes on the go. After receiving this feedback, I began to work on some wireframes for a mobile app that would not only make it easy for clients to order boxes but also provide value by creating a blog which gives style tips.
Designing the app
After I had created initial wireframes, I did some usability testing with a select few of my clients and incorporated some feedback they provided. I then began to create higher fidelity designs while also creating a prototype in Adobe XD.
Analytics and results
Dapper Crew is still a small scale company but it’s already experiencing success and generating revenue. We have plans to scale up and grow our business.
