Sunnies to You is a sunglasses subscription box by Resultco, a West Bloomfield-based watch and sunglasses marketer and distributor. The idea is the customer can sign up for the monthly service, pick their favorite sunglasses from a gallery they can sort by shape, and have them delivered monthly. To sweeten the deal, we added in name brands along with house brands, but they were limited in quantity. This project had been circling around in edits for months before I was pulled on to it. We went through several variations, changing the features and options and selling points and the language in the calls to action. The final version is the product of management allowing me to design the site from scratch.
The audience for Sunnies to You is in the 18-30 range and a budding fashion connoisseur. The brand is flashy and focused on Summer. Bright colors, blue skies, happy people in the sun.
Subscription boxes are an interesting market space; in a lot of ways, they’re selling taste. They’re selling their curation so that you don’t have to sort through the vast expanses of products online and in stores. Subscription boxes base their sales strategy on the consumer’s desire for products to be brought to their attention, and subsequently their doorstep, in a box, monthly. There aren’t a lot of options, but that’s the selling point. It’s a clever flip from the consumer-choice-centric model that’s so prominent on the internet and I can appreciate that.
Sunnies to You was a moving target from the start. Features and options were up in the air, and there were other, more important fires for the developers to put out at the time. We went through two designs before one of the developers brought it to my attention that the company had previously hired a marketing company to create the branding. And they gave us a whole set of files, with logos and photography! So that was helpful, so say the least. It wasn’t super great work, but it was a start, and it was something that I could work off of as an aesthetic. We ended up replacing all of the tag lines they gave us, as well as most of the visual icons and elements. But we kept the style of the photography and the clouds-in-the-sky motif for backgrounds. I ordered a number of new photos for the website as well, but kept the same general style and color overlay motif.
After some discussion with the head developer, we agreed on a set of features to be implemented before launch, such as a favorites list and a list of previous orders.
I also worked with the social media manager to create posts and advertisements for Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. It was nice to open up After Effects again, it had been a while.
I’m happy with the work that I did on this project. I think that the business model could have been tweaked to be more honest and fit the subscription box market better. I think that subscription boxes thrive on their curation—the fact that the consumer can’t really choose the specific products they get, only a general style—and I think that we missed that demand with Sunnies to You. I’m also not a big fan of the name. Who calls sunglasses “Sunnies”? It’s juvenile, and immaturity is carried into the primary color scheme. I feel it lacked subtlety and nuance.
That said, I’m very happy with how the video advertisements turned out. That was a lot of work, but I think they were effective and fit the brand very well. I think that that it’s important for a brand to have some kind of video content in the modern internet. Sunnies to You was, for me, a learning experience in messaging, and I’ve found video to be a very useful and powerful messaging medium. I am happy with how the overall project turned out and what I was able to do with it, but I do have issues with how the business worked and feel that the direction of the project was often murky.