The problem
Bassols wanted to stop coming across as a traditional brand and position itself as a premium one, both in its B2C and its B2B portal. The previous website wasn't helping with that shift, and wasn't converting the way it should either, and on top of that the project had an added layer of complexity: it wasn't a single website, but two different experiences coexisting on the same platform (individual consumers on one side, hospitality and textile professionals on the other), each with its own navigation, its own flows and its own audience.
The design challenge wasn't just aesthetic. Everything about how the whole catalog was organized had to be defined from scratch, along with how each type of user navigated it, and we had to deliver a design system solid enough for the development team to build on without ambiguity — knowing, on top of that, that the work had to fit a brand identity that was being defined in parallel.
Solution
We started out sitting in on the customer experience workshop led by Artefacto, so the work would be based on real data rather than assumptions. From there we worked on the information architecture with card sorting specific to each user profile (B2C and B2B separately), and built the wireframes for the whole ecommerce site: home, categories, product page, cart, checkout, collection landing pages, user area, and all the pages specific to the B2B portal.
With the structure validated, we moved into the visual design phase, applying the new identity that This Is Odd was delivering in parallel. We ran several rounds of visual direction proposals until we locked in the final look and feel, then extended it across every view in the project. The final deliverable was a complete design system so Inbound Emotion's development team could implement it on Magento without depending on us for every question.
The work didn't end when the design was delivered. We actively supervised the actual implementation, reviewing in detail how each section was being built (responsive behavior, spacing and typography consistency, component states) so the final result wouldn't fall short of the approved design.
Results
The new site launched with a differentiated experience for B2C and B2B on a single platform, with a visual language matching the premium repositioning the brand was after. The collaboration with Bassols stayed active after the initial launch, when they wanted to strengthen cross-selling between complementary product categories, they came back to us to design that feature on top of the live site — a sign that the design system built in the larger project kept serving as the foundation for any later evolution.
