Reimagining the future of retail with Arnsdorf

Arnsdorf is an Australian womenswear brand designed for women of both style and purpose. In 2017, the brand worked with Portable to relaunch itself as a modern digital retailer, including rethinking how they connect with their customers.

Business for good

Arnsdorf was launched in 2008 and operated successfully across Australia and North America, connecting with women looking for a wardrobe that was versatile and timeless.

In 2011, the brand’s creator, Jade Sarita Arnott decided to close its doors. She was dissatisfied with the state of the fashion industry and events such as the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh had cast a dark shadow over the ethics of supply chain management.

With its relaunch, Arnsdorf wanted to achieve the following things:

Greater connections between the people who make clothes and the people who wear them.
Transparency — in terms of where materials are sourced from, how clothes are made and by whom — to allow customers make informed decisions.
A truly modern shopping experience through practices such as free shipping and returns, direct to customer experiences and digital interactions.

We started by performing a very broad ‘Define Phase’ to fully traverse best practice in modern ecommerce and retail. This also meant working directly with customers and consumers to understand the exact positioning that Arnsdorf could take within the Australian retail landscape.
Using these insights we put together the brand architecture, drawing upon the previous aesthetic and brand guidelines that had shaped Arnsdorf’s success in its first iteration. This defined everything from the look and feel of the website, to the tone and language of email campaigns and social media.
Finally, we designed and created an entirely new customer journey from website to delivery. This took into account a wide range of activities including communications strategy, logistical functions and relationship management.

The end result is the fully relaunched Arnsdorf brand, digital platform and customer experience. This includes:

A complete digital platform, using a custom designed template powered by Shopify e-commerce.
Full customer journey workflow, integrating a customer CRM, Campaign Monitor and Slack as well as a phone integration using Twilio to manage customer service.
A newly designed logistics workflow that includes shipping and returns through Uber and Australia Post.
Customer feedback loop that provides up to date information back to the design team.