Mak­ing a new classic

The (short) story

What start­ed as a brand­ing explo­ration quick­ly became a full plat­form devel­op­ment project. Our team built The­High­boy from the ground up, cre­at­ing fea­tures and expe­ri­ences for sell­ers and buy­ers, mar­ket­ing inte­gra­tions, ana­lyt­ics and data man­age­ment, pri­va­cy and pay­ment inter­faces, and more.

The Approach

1. Start with the brand

Our first step into the project was com­ing up with a brand new logo, visu­al iden­ti­ty, brand guide and mate­ri­als. We need­ed some­thing ele­gant, edi­to­r­i­al, strong, cur­rent yet clas­sic. I think we nailed it but hey, I’m just a biased copy­writer! Check it out: 
 

The High­Boy logo, 2013

2. Take a mil­lion notes

This wasn’t a sim­ple cor­po­rate site design, brand­ing, blog, or an eCom­merce gig. It was all of that all of that togeth­er and then some. We need­ed to cre­ate an entire mar­ket­place from scratch. It had to reflect the founder’s vision, sat­is­fy the buy­er, and please and engage the sell­ers. And above all we need­ed to come up with a prod­uct in tune with a very spe­cif­ic niche indus­try where beau­ty means everything. 

Div­ing into such a process is not easy if you don’t know what you’re talk­ing about, so we had to dive into the exot­ic world of antiques and anti­quar­ies, head first. Do you know what Gus­ta­vian fur­ni­ture is? We didn’t. We lis­tened hard and learnt faster.

Mobile app design

3. Dis­rupt an industry

So we had our design, our back­end UX, and we need­ed to move on to cod­ing. We chose a stack of tech ensur­ing per­for­mance, speed and reli­a­bil­i­ty. We devel­oped a bespoke back­end and ecom­merce plat­form using Rails. Then we added the fin­ish­ing touch­es with a beau­ti­ful online mag­a­zine, a per­fect newslet­ter, and an unmatch­able user experience.