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Thoughtfully curated, vintage home decor sets

A Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Master of Arts in Graphic and Web Design Capstone Project by Aubrey Hart

A Modern Take on Vintage Resale

In recent years the vintage resale market for furniture and housewares in the United States has increased significantly. Though, not everyone shares the same passion I have for retail, and challenges like finding quality items, pairing them together, and the time it takes to curate a complete space with vintage items poses large hurdles for the average shopper.

Born from a personal passion for retail, Vignette Collections is a hyper-local eCommerce business specializing in the curation of vintage home decor sets. Vignette caters to consumers with a desire for sustainable vintage home decor but without the time, interest or know how to curate scenes of their own. 

In order to address customer hurdles, Vignette offers pre-curated sets to reduce the amount of decision-making and shopping time, product photos that show the consumer exactly how they can style a set in their home, and an easy to use web experience allowing users to view items without digging around for hours in a store, reducing time and complexity involved in the vintage shopping process.

Process

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    Curation

    Over the course of the semester I curated 8 sets that best exemplify the goals of Vignette Collections. The process of curating the individual sets followed four main steps: source quality vintage items (online estate sale auctions, craigslist, facebook marketplace), group items that are stylistically/thematically similar to create foundational sets, shop more intentionally to complete sets, and then style/photograph final sets.

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    Wireframes

    I created wireframes in Figma to kick off the website creation process, and intentionally designed them to exist somewhere between lo-fidelity and fully designed, allowing me to hop right from wireframing into development. Many of the pages were designed to work as templates, so that they could be easily replicated and keep the same structure, while housing unique information.

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    Development

    Once I got into development, the simplified approach to design allowed me to create 13 pages from 5 core templates. Once wireframes and the site architecture were ready to go, I was able to jump into development. I built the site with the vue.js framework, which allowed me to componentize many elements and write cleaner, more dynamic code than if I had built the site solely using HTML and CSS. During this phase I made tweaks to the design based on periodic feedback from different audiences.

Research +
User Testing

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After developing my first pass of the homepage I shared it with a group of coworkers for feedback via google forms. I work at a small software company and was able to get feedback from developers, customer success associates, and marketers. In addition to sharing a google form, as the site development progressed I also shared my code with a front-end developer and a video walkthrough of the vignette concept with an online vintage business owner. I asked them for specific feedback, with a list of questions targeted toward their respective areas of expertise.

Early feedback from coworkers helped guide me to a final navigation design, that did not include images in the original arched shapes that I had included in wireframes. The general consensus was that instead of being a refreshing take on a header, it was ultimately too different from the norm, which made it confusing. Feedback from my development subject matter expert helped iron out any kinks that happened during the export and build of the vue site.

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Deliverables

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The project culminated in 8 curated sets housed on the Vignette Collections website. I also developed a brand guide as a source of truth for future asset development.

Summary

For now Vignette Collections exists as a Capstone project, and I will not be immediately be pursuing it as a business. The sets I curated will still be sold together, for now on facebook marketplace and delivered locally. Throughout this process I have come to better understand the amount of time and effort it takes to curate even a small set of vintage decor. From that understanding has come ideas for new businesses and other applications of my love for vintage retail that may one day come to fruition.

The final version is live via Github pages and while users cannot complete the purchase process on the site, they will be able to peruse current sets for inspiration and eventually link to where they can find them on the web. It also offers a custom curation page that allows interested customers to request a consultation where I will talk to them about their project vision and provide a quote for custom curation services.