About the project
So Bridely is a wedding dress platform that was founded by two wedding professionals with the goal of making the dress finding experience fun and easy. The team at So Bridely is dedicated to celebrating love and building meaningful relationships with their brides and boutiques. Whether you find your dream dress in a store or online, So Bridely wants to make sure that every bride feels beautiful, confident, and special on her big day.
This project was finished in about 6 months, ~2 months of design, ~3 months of dev and the last month to put on finishing touches
The SoBridely team wanted a website that was completely revamped. The original site was made in wordpress. Upon diving into the application code and product requirements it was decided that in order to maintain a functional product in the future and make updates more efficient we would have to migrate to a newer stack.
I migrated the Sobridley product from using a mix of Shopify and Wordpress to a custom React app with Stripe integrated for customer purchases and merchant onboarding.
Features
Buying / Selling
In order to give flexibility for this project we created the store front from scratch, enabling us to hand tailor each part of the experience for the customer. Sellers could sign up exclusively through the products website giving information about their boutique, and seller profile. Once onboarded sellers could start listing dresses. I used Stripe integration to process sellers as either sole propietors or LLC companies. Based on the seller type we required different information. All of this was handled dynamically through the UI experience. We allowed users to browse and buy dresses without an account. Only after purchasing a dress did we ask users to enter a password to complete their account. This lowered friction for new users who may not want to give their email and sign up until they have received some value from the product.
Product Questions
After having a few sellers on the platform we quickly found that their was a lack of communication on the product.
We created a new method to have potential buyers feel more comfortable about their purchase. Dress questions. For questions about a specific dress users could ask a question right on the product page for other potential buyers to see. You can think "Amazon Questions" section. This allowed for more transparency into what other people also were concerned about and gave sellers a chance to fill in those gaps of understanding.
Product Boosts
The owner for this project wanted another avenue to provide value and revenue for the business. We ended up with creating product boosts for sellers.
This allowed sellers to have specific dresses ranked higher on search results than others. You can consider this similarly to sponsored posts on platforms like Facebook market place. Sellers could track the performance of their dresses right from the dashboard and see how many clicks/views their dress was getting.
Boosts are a great example of how to add an extra layer of value for your customers and drastically increase revenue.
In App Messaging
We found that buyers sometimes had specific questions about a dress or their order and didn't always feel comfortable exchanging their contact information.
In order to better facilitate communication about orders we integrate in app messaging. This is a free form messaging environment where users can speak directly to the seller without ever leaving the app. There were a few things about this feature that we had to integrate as well to make it safe and feature rich. Such as content filtering, and upload /download availability.
Project results
SoBridely ended up being a huge hit with the local area of San Francisco which is where the founders are also based out of. All expected features where complete within the 6 month time frame and enabled brides to make back some of the money they spent on their wedding dress as well as help new brides find awesome deals to make their big day a little less stressful.
