Farm Rio is one of Brazil’s leading fashion brands, with collabs with global powerhouses such as Adidas and Levi’s. When they were pushing forward with their overseas expansion, the pandemic hit, and they were forced to rethink the way they worked to sell products to international buyers. 

This is where I came in, and this is when Farm Showroom was born, and later evolved into Farm Rio Wholesale, a B2B platform where buyers get to know and order new collections and plan ahead which Farm Rio products they want to have in their stores.

The first challenge was to actually understand what had to be done. It was a completely new situation, the pandemic was casting uncertainties over everyone and even the people at Farm Rio didn’t actually know what they were looking for. A process of discovery with the hands-on participation of the Wholesale team at Farm Rio was crucial in getting the first directions.

The second challenge was to identify both business and users’s needs, and then to think about the intersection of those needs. Once again our main source of information at this point was the sales team, and based on the results of the discovery meetings, I started mapping different user profiles and behaviors, and sketched the first user flows.

Solving the first two challenges, came the third one: shaping the user experienceand the next discovery meetings involved inputs from the creative team.

Farm Rio is all about beauty. Their products are visually striking and easily recognizable due to their bold use of colors, patterns and illustrations, with a passion for craft and detail. So the outcome of the project had to be not only usable and useful, letting the products shine while also being itself a beautiful product.

Farm Rio’s creative team wanted to explore and experiment with visual styles and languages for a long time, but felt that the constraints of the brand’s styleguide wouldn’t let them. The nature of the project presented itself as an opportunity for this, and I was given full creative autonomy. We took inspiration from fashion editorials and magazines, as well as other fashion sites that leaned heavily on visuals.

Our main visual drives were: experimentation with typography, bold use of colors, asymmetric compositions and juxtaposed elements.

From the start, we had to deal with one key constraints: time. The first version had to be up and running in just 40 days, starting from the kickoff meeting. This was only possible due to 2 very talented developers that embraced the project and this strict deadline.

From the development time limitation came one big decision: to focus on delivering an exceptional experience on desktop, and desktop only. We took this bet based on an assumption we had about context of use of the platform: since it was a B2B site, open to a very selected audience with very specific needs, it was safe to assume that users would be visiting the site on their computers.

After the first version was a success, the project was greenlit for new versions, and in time, it became a full fledged digital product, and not a seasonal project.

We started working in a 3-month development cycle, since that was roughly the time between collection launches. Deadlines and planning in the fashion industry aren't always an exact science, so this cycle had to be tweaked from time to time. Some collections we had just small improvements, others we shipped full and complex features.

Over 3 years we managed to launch 10 major updates, including a mobile version, an Order Flow for buyers, an Admin Section for the sales team management, a Client Area with order tracking, lots of new components and a revamped data structure.

Unfortunately, due to business and strategic concerns, most of this project can't be published, but I can set up a small and harmless presentation to get into a little more detail, so get in touch.