Selection for Design Within Reach — a digital app for Design Within Reach, amplifying product exploration through immersive storytelling, spotlighting designers

Problem

Design Within Reach, once revered for bringing authentic European designs to North America, lost credibility due to a plagiarism scandal. (Link to Fast Company article) How can Design Within Reach restore trust and authenticity?

Solution

Introducing Selection for DWR — a digital application that offers curated educational tours within Design Within Reach stores, allowing customers to explore and learn about authentic product stories firsthand.

Research

The business

Design Within Reach is a high-end furniture company that started in 1998. They were successful because they made authentic, modern designs from Europe available quickly in North America for the first time. 

The problem

In the early 2000s, the company was known as the leaders of design education and taste making. However, due to mismanagement, Design Within Reach began selling knockoff products and plagiarized designs which ruined their reputation and trust with the design community.

Although the knockoffs have been discontinued, and leadership changed, Design Within Reach continues to be seen as a brand that sells knockoff products, diverging from their core value of authenticity.  

Brand’s core values

Through research, my team was able to synthesize 3 core values of the company that work in a cyclical fashion- authenticity, storytelling, and education. However, as Design Within Reach's values weren't being translated to its consumers, my team decided to convey these values through a digital medium.

Consumer research

Through learning about the brands values, my team framed the following question, How can Design Within Reach intelligently inform consumers about authenticity in an environment of changing consumer habits? We later reframed this question to ask, How can Design Within Reach emphasize the designer, detailing, process, and effort behind their products to align the consumer with the brand’s tangible and intangible values?

With these questions in mind, my team ventured to find user data, and statistics that would help us understand the consumers and their shopping habits. My team came across a study by Think with Google (2013) which highlighted the painpoints of shoppers. Their results showed that consumers are utilizing their mobile devices in-store while browsing to find further information such as customer reviews, picture comparisons, and similar items.

User journey

My team created a journey framework that addresses the journey of the customer experience in Design Within Reach’s retail environment. Through this we were able to identify the key frictions and potential touch points for intervention, specifically as the user first learns and interacts with the products.