Shiyu (Ash) Wang
Gentle Monster - VR Shopping
How might we design an immersive online experience for the fashion retail industry, in order to help the brand stand out in the post-pandemic world?
“Gentle Monster - VR Shopping” aims at creating an immersive and interactive online experience for the Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster. Understanding the customer experience and analyzing how design can help in the screen-based environment is the focus of the design process. The objective is to let the customer experience more fun while shopping conveniently.
The design offers customers an immersive and interactive experience by using virtual reality, which greatly improves the interaction and fun of online shopping. It fulfills the needs of both regular and potential customers by maintaining the convenience of online shopping and adding exciting and entertaining elements brought by offline shopping. It helps to increase the brand influence and its sales volume by attracting more potential customers.
Insight
The fashion industry has been negatively affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Around the world, more people are shopping online. With technology development and global digitalization, this trend is expected to continue. According to Nasdaq, consumers will make 95% of purchases online by 2040. This makes designing for virtual spaces and their interaction mode an essential part of the future fashion retail industry.
Idea
The concept of “Immersive VR Adventure” provides customers a virtual world to explore and interact with Gentle Monster’s products. The shopping bag floating on the top right of the screen allows users to collect their liked items without having to exit the VR experience. Corresponding to Gentle Monster’s brand style, the virtual space has a fresh and explorative theme - "the Fantasy of Nature.” Around the theme, there are 3 surreal worlds: The Dark Lagoon, The Midday Lands, and The Dreamy Isle. This series has been designed to show the moment where we are looking for comfort and freedom. The user can travel around the world through the connection portals.
Impact
The design offers an unusual shopping experience. The freshness and excitement brought by VR immersive Experience meet both the brand and its customers’ value of “experience the unexpected”. Also, It helps to increase the brand influence and its sales volume by attracting more potential customers. Finally, the project adopts the emerging technology to the traditional industry, which is not only a brave attempt but also can be used as a reference for later development of this concept.
Biography
Shiyu (Ash) is a young designer proficient in UX design. Initially, she was drawn to industrial design because she was motivated by MUJI’s “super normal” design, and wanted to design everyday things not only to enrich people’s quality of life but also to solve real problems. However, her interest began to shift from physical design to digital design gradually. This shift became concrete in her third year, when she began to learn more about the current industry and the fields of experience design, interactive media, and system design. This made her realize that to achieve the goal of designing products and services that solve real problems, she would need to focus on digital methods and technological tools, not only physical objects. Now, she is self-driven, an eager learner, and an innovative thinker devoted to exploring more interactive methods in the field of UX design.