# Fabletics

[View the designed case study](https://rbkh.design/projects/fabletics)

- **Role:** Design Manager

- **Scope:** Web, iOS, In-store

- **Tenure:** 2018-2022

- **Status:** Past work

## Overview

TechStyle Fashion Group is home to five DTC eCommerce brands, including Kate Hudson's Fabletics and Rihanna's Savage x Fenty. After joining the company in late 2018, I got involved in a lot: enhancing their in-house merch and marketing tools, rethinking their associate- and shopper-facing retail tech, and helping their brands align their shopping experiences.

In May of 2021, I stepped into my final role at the company, building and leading a team of seven UX/UI Designers across Web, Mobile, and Retail for Fabletics.

## Timeline

- **2018 — Cross-brand Design Ops:** Established design systems for five brands (including Fabletics) and two internal platforms.
- **2021 — Launched Fabletics UX:** Joined the brand as a Design Manager and grew the team from three to eight.
- **2022 — Redesigned Fabletics App:** Took a decade of brand learning and designed a true omnichannel native experience for Fabletics shoppers.

For most eCommerce companies, a native app is a no-brainer: more popular with shoppers, better lead quality and conversion rates, higher experience fidelity, and more. After joining the Fabletics team, I helped Product leadership define what the future of native looks like for a company that grew up as a website and is now a billion-dollar brand with hundreds of retail locations.

For me and my design team, that meant a mix of tactical work and strategic ideation. Investing early in building out Figma tools like our app design system allowed us to deliver day-to-day design work rapidly and spend more time on research and ideation around the future state we wanted to reach.

![Fabletics project image](https://rbkh.design/projects/fabletics/fabletics-ds.jpeg)

That vision for the future was rooted in a variety of influences: direct input from executive stakeholders, clear patterns in what we heard from users across feedback channels, and our own desire to deliver a native experience that felt genuinely world class among other players in the space like Lululemon, Athleta, and Vuori.

Competitive analysis rhythms were a big part of our process. Regular auditing helped me and my team keep our instincts strong and provided a steady stream of inspiration to share with our Product partners as they advocated for new initiatives with execs.

![Fabletics project image](https://rbkh.design/projects/fabletics/fabletics-ca.png)

Driving everything was our intention to make the native experience feel deeply interwoven with the entire customer journey of a Fabletics member, not just the part that happens on their phone. That meant parity with web where users expected it, retail-first features that made shopping at a Fabletics store with your phone feel like magic, and members-only perks to deepen the joy our subscription users got from being part of the Fabletics community.

As 2021 wound down, I dove into a couple of areas we've been itching to refresh: our home and our member profile screens. Long-time subscribers and retail employees were excited to see the emphasis on in-store shopping, and execs were excited to see a fresh take on our years-old app.

> Check out a couple of before-and-after mocks below and [click here](https://www.figma.com/proto/HrbD8rHaHiSwpxhTwYSCGN/'22-App-Ideation-(Archive)?node-id=3%3A808&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=3%3A808) for a narrow prototype of the home screen.

![Fabletics project image](https://rbkh.design/projects/fabletics/fabletics-app.png)