PlatformE

PlatformE - Ideation & Development

PlatformE is a digital fashion company based out of Oporto that has been helping fashion brands optimize their design process by creating digital replicas of their garments during ideation stage, and not have to incur in the costly development of those garments until they are approved for production. PlatformE is the brainchild of José Neves, the founder of Farfetched.

During the pandemic, the world moved online, and so did the fashion industry. Most fashion brands were doing fashion weeks on digital worlds and metaverses.

We worked together with PlatformE to ideate and launch a new concept that would tackle these new opportunities in digital fashion + virtual worlds.

Discovery stage

The initial insights that triggered the project were two of the main assets in the company: 

• Their customers, fashion brands, were requesting using the digital garments they produced as assets in virtual worlds, which needed retopology to adapt to virtual worlds. 

• Digital artists they worked with to deliver part of the solutions

We conducted structured product discovery interviews with all parties to understand pain points and especially, jobs to be done. To learn more about this framework, read here.

We quickly identified marketing strategy teams and design teams as the key decision markets who had the budget for such initiatives.

The concept

Skinvaders was born to connect fashion brands, digital artists and virtual worlds to turn the world's 3.5bn gamers and virtual world users into a branding and distribution channel for fashion brands.

The platform we developed for Skinvaders and PlatformE allowed fashion brands to: 

1. Develop a virtual world strategy: Access a data-room to identify virtual worlds that best suit the brand’s target. Decide where to launch garments, what audiences to target, how to measure impact on sales etc.

2. Build the garments under the standards of each virtual world. Automate the translation of the brand’s ideas and collections´ requirements into functional for real-time 3D content.

3. Track performance of their campaigns and iterate

Digital artists would learn to engage with fashion brands in the domain of digital fashion for virtual worlds, make money, and build a personal brand around their work.

We helped world known brands like Zara, Puma, Timberland, Brilliant Earth, Marine Serre, DKNY and many more to deploy their virtual world strategies into virtual worlds like Roblox, Snap, Zepeto, Decentaland and more.

The Skinvaders platform streamlined the whole process to avoid human intervention as much as possible, and gathered data for future automation through AI.

Validation

The platform was entirely designed by us, and went through multiple iterations of product testing with fashion brands and digital artists in order to pinpoint the best possible design in terms of system architecture, 3D design workflow process and interface components. For this, all prototypes were designed, always in high fidelity, never mockups, using Invision and Figma. We also used blindfold testing with UserTesting.com

The tech stack

The platform was built with a backend on Python’s Django, frontend with AngularJS and a CMS on Strapi. This setup allowed us to build a single webapp that would handle marketing content as well as our own API. We used Algolia for the search engine.

We developed a web component library using Tailwind to guarantee high quality and standard design across the whole platform, something which was especially relevant given the amount of digital artists that visited the platform. We needed high warranties that it would always be pixel perfect.