Founded 2012 in San Francisco American Giant is a manufacturer of casual and staple clothing pieces committed to sourcing everything possible in it’s supply chain domestically from United States sources. From cotton field to retail sale their commitment to a US based supply chain ensures fair wages, decreased carbon footprint, and the revitalization of United States based manufacturing. The result is quality garments made to last a lifetime. A challenger to fast-fashion’s wasteful and often exploitative status-quo.
As a designer working in-house for the American Giant brand I have touched on all pieces of the business from print and digital assets to experiential and retail collateral and everything in-between and beyond. The company is small and the creative team smaller.
Above and below are catalogs and mailers for the 2021 year. The American Giant catalog straddles the line between lookbook, catalog, and magazine, highlighting persons of note in the US between the pages of product.
For smaller seasons such as summer or holiday unique sized direct mail pieces were made and sent out to subscribers.
The catalogs and direct mail were a fun outlier of my job functions. A more influential role was helping design a better user experiences. Below was a redesign of the e-comerce product display page. Before the refresh photos were oddly sized into a mosaic and the product information, floated over content, limiting the photo team to certain crops. The after has a featured image and thumbnails as well as advanced information in accordion drop downs. The content is above the fold for many device sizes keeping all of the relavent information front-and-center. I worked on this project cross functionally with the in-house e-commerce team and a partnering engineering and development agency.
Alongside the same teammates I also redesigned the in-cart-experience adding gamification for shipping incentives, suggestions based on browsing data, and integration with popular one-click payment methods. In the case of an empty cart a few value props were added as well as a bit of visual interest with an empty American Giant shopping bag. Both redesigns were successful in driving increases to to conversion from site traffic.
Landing pages were also a large part of acquisition and conversion and used regularly to drive ad traffic to the site. Often customers landed on one of these marketing pages from a social network paid ad or a collaboration. Each page is either an evergreen page or part of a campaign necessitating unique layouts.
The main marketing channel during my tenure was email marketing. Email blasts went out to different cohorts based on shopping habits and triggers such as abandoned carts, or time since last interaction. On average I designed 5-7 emails a week and most of them were unique content. During the holidays, a time when consumer fashion companies make most of their capital for the year, the number of sends and designs were in the double-digits every week until the new year.
Despite it’s digital origins and continuing presence in the digital space, the brand also has physical retail stores. During my tenure I helped design environmental pieces for three new locations. San Jose, California, Hingham Massachusetts, and Boston Massachusetts as well as refresh signage, and installations at their other three locations in San Francisco and New York.
Each store is unique in size and shape and permanent signage and window campaigns all have to be designed to spec, a task that I helped the retail team navigate throughout the three new store openings and four brand campaigns.
