When I first joined Nordstrom, I admittedly had very little knowledge of the fashion industry. I shopped infrequently for clothes, and was certainly not familiar with the series of disruptions that had led to the current “retail apocalypse,” which left many fashion retailers bankrupt or scrambling for new strategies in an Amazonian world.
To better understand the quickly shifting competitive landscape and the fickle consumer climate, I purchased, read, and annotated eight books on the fashion industry. Inspired by my studies, I put together a design strategy pitch deck and presented it to design and product leaders, ultimately influencing Nordstrom’s product roadmap. I served as the lead designer for this project, and collaborated with UX Research, Strategy, CSR, Data Science, Marketing, and Product.
The first deck I created was on the modern history of the fashion industry. I identified the disruptions and noticed that they were escalating in speed and magnitude. As I considered which disruptions that Nordstrom should participate in (to “self-disrupt,” in industry parlance), many of them (e.g. faster and faster fashion, mega-marketplaces) did not seem to align with Nordstrom’s heritage and brand or its innate and developed strengths. I also felt it was foolish to consider a strategy that is already being pursued aggressively by any number of rivals and upstarts. What, instead, was developing over the horizon?
I sensed something in the ether, gathering steam to form into a real movement that aligned with Nordstrom’s brand—capitalized upon its strengths—and it was not being aggressively pursued by any other major or minor fashion company. I recognized similar shifts and patterns between fashion and another consumer industry (of which I had a personal passion): food.
In both industries, there has been a gradual rise in consciousness around the unintended consequences of the things we consume. Consequences on environmental impact, animal rights, labor rights, and human health. The food industry, however, is 15-20 years ahead of the fashion industry in terms of the sophistication of their conscious offerings and of the consumers’ demands. What can the food industry teach us about what might be next for fashion? And who the winners and losers will be? I pitched that idea to my broader UX team, and was granted support to explore this further.
As I was learning more about the current trajectory of the fashion industry, I started to brainstorm UX ideas on how we can help customers shop more consciously and sustainably.
I also reached out to Nordstrom's Corporate Social Responsibility team, and found an engaged business partner who wanted to campaign for these changes throughout the company (she had been exploring similar initiatives). We met throughout the coming months and gathered with a number of stakeholders whose teams could unlock sustainability-oriented features.
Shoppable module featuring sustainable alternatives, embedded within product results
Positive metrics, relative to other products of the same item type, located the product details page
Analogous inspiration in the food industry inspired me to think of the similarity of grocery and department stores, in that they present a smorgasbord of brands for all your needs (in your wardrobe/pantry). Whole Foods, one of the fastest growing grocery stores in the past half-century, periodically innovated in their stores by updating product information displays to tell you something new about their array of products, and organize the data in consistent, easy-to-compare ways (e.g. ANDI scores on produce, animal welfare ratings on their meat, organic and non-GMO labels).
After an initial draft of a nutritions-facts-inspired chart of sustainability metrics (see below), it seemed apparent that as a retailer it would be better to highlight the positive than highlight everything (which would be cost-prohibitive regardless). The second version focuses only on positive metrics, and simplifies the UI considerably (see above).
Item-specific sustainability metrics, covering origin, supply chain, manufacturing, and life cycle of product, located on product details page
After Whole Foods and a spate of mom-and-pop shops brought organic food to the national consciousness, the established grocery store chains began introducing organic produce into their stores with a dedicated portion of their square footage. I explored below how this could translate into a digital environment, with entrypoints in the top navigation and a sustainable-themed landing page.
Page-top navigation and sectioned flyout, giving prime real estate to sustainable offerings
Sustainable department landing page to visually showcase all of Nordstrom’s sustainable products
I also explored how a shopper can filter product results based on sustainable attributes, and how attributes might be highlighted earlier in the shopping journey on product results.
This set of features (badging and filtering) had the highest value to the customer and to the sustainable movement, as it took an existing shopping journey and raised awareness of and channeled the customer towards a sustainable approach. As a team, we explored different ways to depict the filters. Should it be a simple binary (sustainable/not sustainable)? Should different dimensions of sustainability (design vs. materials vs. manufacturing) be separate filters? I felt the common conscious consumer (or even armchair environmentalist) would simply want the most sustainable product that fits the bill, so I suggested multiple levels of sustainability (similar to the animal welfare ratings at Whole Foods) that would differentiate companies (and thus products) with differing levels of commitment to the cause. It also provided motivation for companies to continually improve their sustainable attributes.
With feedback from stakeholders, I refined my designs for a number of ideas and pitched them to Product to evaluate scope, investment, and current hurdles. Product suggested we run a Concept Value Test (CVT), which would survey over a thousand Nordstrom customers about their interest level in these feature ideas. We then collaborated with Strategy, Personal Styling, and Store Experiences to build out a questionnaire for the CVT.
Filters within results to assist users in finding only sustainable options
Badges on product modules that show at a glance a product’s level of sustainability
While the CVT was in process, we fixed the simplest and cheapest problem: search. When users tried to search for sustainable products using the keyword “sustainable” or “eco” or “eco-conscious” or “environmentally friendly,” only a small percentage of our sustainable inventory actually showed up in results. I also collaborated with Data Science to perform a data analysis on search trends for sustainable search terms, and found a significant upward trend in searches over the last year.
The overall quantity of search terms was small, but we hypothesized that it has little to do with the general interest level of the public in sustainable consumer goods, and a lot more to do with 1.) the undependable quality of the deficient search results, 2.) the unsatisfactorily low number of sustainable merchandise in our inventory, and 3.) Nordstrom’s lack of PR/marketing energy around this topic.
We felt that fixing this issue was a step to legitimizing sustainability as an important product attribute in the eyes of our customers. After a few meetings with Product Operations and Search, we retroactively tagged all the existing sustainable products and developed a working process that would ensure that all sustainable goods would be tagged to show up in search results for the search term “sustainable” and all of its various synonyms.
Strategy conducted an online quantitative survey of 1,318 of our loyal Nordstrom customers to evaluate the potential impact and value of a number of sustainable features and services. On a seven-point scale, 54% of customers rated the concept of identifying sustainable goods in-store and online as a 6 or 7 out of 7 (highly or extremely appealing). The results for the various UX ideas can be seen below.
Customer Feedback
“I really appreciate that this is a priority for Nordstrom! I love it!”
“Thank you for even thinking about this.”
“I am really glad Nordstrom is choosing to focus on this and I hope you emerge the leader!”
“Thank you for raising my awareness about shopping for sustainable clothing. I consider sustainability for food and packaging, but hadn’t spent too much time applying the concern to clothing. I will now.”
“What you have stated here in this survey has been great. If you do any of these, you are ahead of the curve.”
“THANK YOU for asking about this. You’ve been pretty silent on this. Love that you’re going to jump in and step up! Love it love it love it!!”
“Nordstrom’s concern for and commitment to the environment and sustainability is long overdue.”
— CVT Survey Respondents
After the CVT validated our ideas, we built out a team with representatives in departments throughout the company, and started to pitch for commitments from various tech teams to determine the complexity and investment of resources for the various UX ideas. Agreement crystallized around the filtering feature as the first experiment to launch.
This proved to be an incredibly challenging feature for several reasons. First, because the industry lacked standardization (a massive problem that Patagonia and Walmart aimed to solve when they cofounded the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and launched the Higg Index), we would receive apples-to-oranges metrics from our brand partners that could not be compared with one another, and thus could not be easily differentiated or classified as having met a particular standard.
Secondly, it was difficult to receive dependable metrics from our brand partners because of the degradation of supply chain transparency resulting from decades of outsourcing and sub-subcontracting of manufacturing to overseas factories. Thirdly, the lack of data in the first place was often due to the unaffordability of validating sourcing and labor practices in overseas factories (that often subcontract to other, even more remote factories). Without data, we would not be able to provide our consumers with the transparency to shop knowledgeably.
The first step was to tackle the back end systems that handled vendor product data collection (currently, the database is egregiously basic, causing an obscene amount of product information to be lost in transmission), which would power up our product data display on our site. The second step was to figure out exactly what standards were meaningful, and how to continue to raise those standards over time so that they would stay relevant. Third, we would need to contact our vendors to let them know that we will be highlighting brands and products that meet these standards in the coming years, so that they would be motivated to change their often decades-old design and manufacturing processes to stay competitive in a more conscious world.
We were able to secure commitment (a major 2019 priority) from our Internal Tools team to redesign and reengineer the data collection databases, to receive and display more useful data. For the second step, we were granted funding so that Corporate Social Responsibility could hire a third-party consultancy, which helped us define sustainability standards at Nordstrom to incorporate into our product labeling, and to highlight and promote brands that are making a difference. Meanwhile, Nordstrom started an at-home and shipping-based clothing donation service.
We knew that the reason why companies did not prioritize this collection of data was that consumers had yet to reward companies for collecting it. But consumers have a hard time rewarding companies for improving transparency because stores like Nordstrom don’t promote the efforts to our customers. Building a grassroots movement takes an entire community, involving the collaboration of journalists, supply chain specialists, marketers, merchandisers, UX designers, engineers, fashion designers, business executives, and everyday consumers. It is also a subtle art to advocate for such an effort within a corporation, since this is a long-term strategy play in a world that often rewards short-term stratagem.
This endeavor was a multi-year project that took a concerted effort on the part of a number of stakeholders to accomplish. By the time I left, Nordstrom was set to launch the first major feature (filtering by level of sustainability) by the end of 2019.