50 Year Retrospective

/ CLIENT

Urban Outfitters, Inc.

/ PROJECT TYPE

Contentful Microsite

/ DURATION

6 months

/ DELIVERABLES

Microsite
Audio interviews
Email campaign

/ BACKGROUND

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Urban Outfitters, Inc. my team created an interactive digital timeline containing audio interviews, historical imagery, and cultural touchstones. The project ran the course of 2020, with weekly installments highlighting a single year of the company.

/ APPROACH

To begin a project of this magnitude, we first needed to align on exactly what we would be creating. To do that, we had an after hours impromptu conversation with our CEO to pitch a few ideas—the one that stuck was an interactive digital timeline a la Finding ctrl:.

Following recently established brand guidelines, our design team did initial exploration with the Urban Outfitters design department. We determined that the optimal experience was an immersive look back into our history complete with audio interviews, archival imagery, pop culture commentary, and business trends.

We then began the arduous task of gathering assets for the project.

• Audio Interviews: I did research into high quality podcasting equipment and went down the YouTube rabbit-hole gaining the skills I would need to successfully interview, record, and cut cohesive yet bit-sized narratives from over 60 contributors.

• Archival Imagery: Compelling visuals is core to URBN’s ethos. We knew we needed to make the site visually interesting to highlight the creativity over the years. Our Creative Director literally went door to door tracking down any references to the items mentioned in our interviews. At times they provided an illustration as a story supplement.

• Pop Culture Commentary: This was all hands on deck populating spreadsheets full of any little bit of pop culture we could get our hands on.

• Business Trends: In 1880 URBN began adding product highlights to sales reports. We worked with merchants to source any information about what were the most popular items sold across stores (and even included some of URBNs product misses along the way).

We engaged out technical partners, Transmogrify, to assist with implementation. During the content model QA it became clear there was a lack of understanding on content workflows and process. I worked with the team to quickly make updates that supported an asynchronous publishing schedule.

/ OUTCOMES

The project ran for an entire year and the team successfully deployed all builds on time and under budget. Internal communication channels had an outpouring of memories and people showed great appreciation for the project.