Willow Collective

Brand Identity

Designing a peer-to-peer rental platform to drive sustainable digital growth.

Brief

An original concept started from a home wardrobe; Willow built a designer dress rental business to serve fashionistas across Northern Ireland. In response to direct customer demand (and a gap in the market) for a lender/rental platform in Ireland, Mitso was briefed to develop an intuitive peer-to-peer designer dress rental platform, the first-of-its-kind in Ireland, to bolster online revenue generation and offer customers greater choice for sustainable fashion in Ireland. 

Goals

Build a new recommerce platform

A sophisticated WooCommerce website with lender / rental capabilities

Improve digital customer experience

Utilising best-in-class UX design and customer-focused navigation

Marketing automation

Introduce email marketing and purchase incentives to drive purchases

Grow market share in Ireland

A first-of-its-kind model in Ireland, paving the way for designer rentals

Solution

Prioritising user-friendly design and navigation, we first assessed customer journeys for Willow-owned versus lender dresses. Our focus was designing an easy-to-use appointment booking system and driving conversions. 

Following a customer-centric design framework, we developed the sitemap and UX design to be customer-oriented and mobile-friendly. Using WooCommerce CMS, we chose a brand-aligned theme, and used just eight plugins to facilitate appointments, contact forms, accounts and dress lending/rental.  

Customer terms and conditions were integral to the website development, e.g. rental timeframes, security deposits and disputes. Focusing on the rental experience, this required calendar functionality to allow users to select pre-defined durations (4, 7 and 10 days, factoring in a 3-day buffer for delivery/return and dry-cleaning.)

The website allows products to be added quickly, as lenders submit a form with details for review. Once approved, the data auto-populates a product and users get a dedicated dashboard for order and availability management. We also deployed bespoke features including conversion-oriented product page structures; cross-sells and up-sells; ‘Edits’ categorising products by event type; “Willow-owned” banner distinguishing lender from Willow Collective, and calendar filtration for Willow studio appointment/rental bookings.

As a small business with sustainability at its core, this project was truly digitally transformative for Willow Collective, facilitating peer-to-peer designer dress rental in a way that hasn’t been done before on the island of Ireland. Shifting to become more reliant on the website to drive traffic from other channels (e.g. demo videos and calls to action on social media), integrating in-studio bookings and rentals, and not accepting bookings via social media or phone.

Willow’s new industry-leading peer-to-peer rental platform is set to transform our business, allowing us to market ourselves as an all-island and UK-wide designer dress rental hub, with an intuitive booking system and the ability to grow online revenue. Our new website marks the next steps in our growth as a business, and Mitso made the development process seamless and straightforward, going the extra mile to support Willow through the digital transition and truly transforming the business. I look forward to working with the team on future digital campaigns!

Willow Collective founder, Cara Heaney

Driven by Digital.

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