Alex Pugach
Product & Visual Designer
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Converse - Pass The Love

 

Converse - Pass The Love

As part of my visual design internship experience at Converse, 24 interns were placed into 4 teams to create a proof of concept product. My team of 6 was given a prompt with a focus on sustainability. The teams then presented to 200+ Converse employees live over Zoom, which my team was voted the ‘Most Innovative Idea’. The prompt and details of our product are below. Due to COVID, the internship was fully virtual.

My Roles: Lead UXUI Designer, Product Designer

Programs: Figma, Illustrator

 
 

The Problem

Shoe manufacturing is part of the growing carbon impact on the environment. Find a way to increase circularity of products already manufactured is needed.

As we began brainstorming and researching our product, we found:

  • Converse is the second largest user of rubber in the footwear industry (behind only Nike).

  • 81% of global consumers feel strongly that companies should help improve the environment.

  • Water required for manufacturing is set to outstrip supply by 40% in 2030.

  • Fashion industry emissions are projected to increase 60% by 2030.

So How Might We… reduce our carbon and waste impact on the environment? Facilitate the renewal of our shoes? Lead with a digital platform?

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Solution

Our solution is our product, Pass The Love.

Pass the Love is a digital website and a branch of Converse.com which enters the growing resale space, while staying unique to the Converse brand. Pass the Love is driven by authentic youth, sustainable living, and diversity. It will allow Converse to sell products which would otherwise be landfilled.

Pass The Love encompasses 3 main aspects: Closing the Loop, Green Initiatives, and Serving the Youth.

  1. Closing The Loop - This means decreasing our carbon and waste impact on the environment and increasing the life cycle of Converse sneakers. Pass The Love does this by:

    • Creating a fail-less supply chain. We will accomplish this goal by reselling minor imperfect manufactured shoes at a discount, which would otherwise be landfilled shoes.

    • We will also streamline a donation process for customers–with every new purchase of a Converse shoe, a customer will have the option to include a return label to return their old Converse sneakers.

  2. Green Initiatives - Shoes that cannot be resold, we will grind them up to be reused in other products. We plan to educate our consumers by providing courses and quizzes which not only speak about textile waste and the implications of rubber on our environment, but also speak about sustainable living.

  3. Serving The Youth - The All Star Community is a vibrant collective of creatives who progress themselves and their communities towards a more sustainable future. Pass the Love gives the All Stars an opportunity to highlight their creativity and passion while simultaneously amplifying our brand narrative by featuring the passion behind our youth community.

Design Process

As lead visual product designer, I was in charge of developing visuals for our digital platform. A lot of the feedback we got up to this point was to integrate Pass The Love into the existing Converse website. The image on the right is my lo-fi mockup of the initial website idea that I presented to my team. We also knew that not only did we need a desktop visual but also a mobile one as 70% of Converse’s digital traffic is mobile.

Tabs for our platform: (1) Resale, (2) Education, (3) All Stars

After the lo-fi mockup, I jumped into Adobe XD. I grabbed layout inspiration from Converse’s website and also current resale websites (PacSun Reserve, ebay).

At the top of PTL, a brief paragraph describes how Pass The Love works and Converse’s goal. Three subtags, Current Lineup, Sustainability 101 and All Stars, sit below this intro paragraph. The background color, lime green, is to set it apart from Converse’s main website and make sure it still feels unique. I also mocked up an ‘Add to Cart’ page, describing imperfections on the shoes (hi-fi mockups of these). I lastly made a mobile layout for Pass The Love. My goal was to create a cohesive visual experience with these few visuals.

Being remote, I took advantage of being able to meet with many employees at Converse and among them current Converse UX Designers. They gave me some great feedback about my layout, accessibility and design. The final hi-fi mockups are below.

Final Frames

For delivery, our group and three other groups presented our ideas to over 200+ Converse employees live on our final day of the internship. Pass The Love was voted the ‘Most Innovative Idea’.