App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup
App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup
App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup

About DW

Founded in late 2012 Designer Wardrobe is a New Zealand based online marketplace for women to sell, buy and rent pre loved designer clothes, shoes and accessories.

Originally started as a Facebook group, Designer Wardrobe branched out with their own website which is used by over 25,000 active members.

Visual Language

Typography

App development project - Wardrobe -  front image

Colors

  • #EF7675
  • #E26160
  • #FFF8F8

Iconography

App development project - Wardrobe -  all icons
App development project - Wardrobe -  like icon

How a website grew into mobile apps

After noticing the increased time their Users were accessing the website on mobile devices, Designer Wardrobe saw the opportunity to enhance the accessibility to their site through developing an app experience to match their current offerings. Native Android and iOS were the perfect solution.

Applikey Choice

Although the decision to commission two mobile apps was a simple one, choosing a partner to deliver on this is never easy. There are a lot of companies and individuals out there that are able to do the work so it’s never easy to choose who to award the project to. Applikey understands this and provides potential customers with great communication and services just as if they were paying customers — no more and no less. It’s the way that we would like potential suppliers to deal with us, so it’s how we work.

DW had already started work on an iOS version with the company which developed its original website but something went wrong and they needed to change their development partner. Because of our reputation, Applikey became their choice.

App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup
App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup
App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup
App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup
App development project - Wardrobe - layout mockup

How we helped

DW initially approached Applikey to pick-up where the last developer finished with the iOS version that had already been built. Starting with someone else’s code can be quite tricky, and this was certainly the case. Every new feature we built first required a lot of fixes to the old code and our developers did a great job to clean it up to make it more succinct, easy to read, robust and well-tested.

The next step

As we always do, we wanted to really understand the core users — who they were, whether there was a typical age or gender profile, what their expectations and preferences might be and how they might use the app before we start on the design. What we found was that DW is a platform for young people who are interested in fashion, we’re tech-savvy and had high expectations on functionality. Naturally Android was on their radar and in this case we could start from scratch. Some modern technologies were used, like Algolia, Sendbird, Aviary from Adobe.

Algolia lets you forget about the complexity of search and delivers instant, relevant results from the first keystroke.

Sendbird provides messaging and chat for the app.

Aviary is a photo editing app that lets you apply a number of different effects onto your photos, from a very intuitive interface that is very simple to work with.

App development project - Wardrobe - phone mockup solutions
App development project - Wardrobe - phone mockup solutions
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Backstage

App development project - Wardrobe - development process