Web App
Fashion, Consumer
Curia is an AI-first fashion styling app that helps its users digitize and utilize their existing closets while also making recommendations to new, curated products.
With an initial PoC built, Curia wanted to refine the application by learning more about their target audience and competitors. With this knowledge, they wanted to expand on application features and redesign the existing experience to be more appealing, intuitive, and competitive in the styling app space.
Perpetual led the end-to-end redesign of the Curia app, leveraging deep UX research to drive the design output.
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Through our partnership with Curia, we successfully illuminated clear differentiation opportunities for their app within a crowded market. By conducting deep user research, we uncovered their primary target audiences to ensure product-market fit. To support long-term growth, we established a scalable design system and component library that ensures brand consistency and efficiency as the company continues to expand.
Our first step on the project was to help the Curia team discover and understand the target audience of their application. We conducted discovery research through both a quantitative survey study and in-depth user interviews.
We carried out a survey study to help us understand the overall landscape more deeply. What are shoppers’ current shopping habits? Where do they shop and how often? What factors do they take into account when making a purchase? Who do they turn to for fashion and trend advice? What Curia competitors have they heard of or used?
We also conducted more in-depth conversations with several participants that met the profile of Curia’s broad target customer. Our goals were to understand a user’s mental models around closet organization, developing personal style, styling existing clothing, and discovering new clothing.
After conducting and analyzing the research, we landed on two distinct personas that Curia’s application would serve. In both cases, fashion and clothing were a high priority; however, the approaches were quite different.
The first persona, Strategic Sadie, considers herself to be fashionable in a more timeless way and less susceptible to trends. She’s a high earner but still wants to make sure she’s getting the best deal when she shops. She takes her time when purchasing clothing, making sure to find pieces that will last and will still be in style for years to come.
Our second persona was Trendy Tara. Her highest priorities when it comes to fashion are staying on-trend and being comfortable. She spends a lot of time thinking about fashion and looking at clothing. She buys clothing much more frequently and retires clothes when they are no longer on trend.
Through analyzing our personas and other research, it became clear that one of the biggest issues with styling and digital closet apps was the effort required to digitize an entire wardrobe. Typically this would involve either finding image online or taking a photo of a piece of clothing, and then adding details to that item.
Because of this, we made it easy to add basics (that most shoppers were likely to have) during the onboarding process, allowing for more generic items in the closet to be added without much effort. This included items such as blue jeans, plain t-shirts, and sneakers.
We also provided several options for how clothing could be added to a shopper’s digital closet, including taking photos, an internet search, receipt uploads, and more. Additionally, every item added is analyzed by Curia’s AI to help fill in clothing details (like color, item type, etc) for better and faster closet management.
Breaking down this barrier created more value for shoppers, ultimately giving the app more material to suggest better outfit combinations and more relevant product suggestions.
Using a combination of surveys, interviews, competitive analysis, and journey mapping, we were able to uncover compelling gaps between the problems shoppers faced and the solutions available in other existing styling apps. The biggest issue hindering shoppers was fit. They often found it difficult to understand whether an item would work for their body type, citing the disparity between their own bodies and typical clothing models.
We designed Curia with this in mind, ensuring the social aspects of the platform included optional body type details. Clothing item details also included sizing and fit ratings, which would ultimately help shoppers find and follow others with similar body types.
Our survey and interview research showed us that shoppers’ behaviors around clothing are undeniably social. Shoppers often chat with their friends about purchases, outfit choices, and the latest trends. They use social media to follow fashion influencers, get inspiration, and show off their outfits.
We made sure Curia had a compelling social experience, centering user profiles around a public view of their closet, outfits, and curated lookbooks. We found that with many shoppers, there’s a significant amount of back-and-forth with friends when looking for new clothes online. We made sure to bring social functionality like following, and sharing to support this in the app.
The application presented a number of opportunities for generating revenue, specifically through styling. Styling services allow shoppers to find and follow professional stylists right on the platform. These stylists can offer a variety of styling products using existing clothing from a shopper’s closet, as well as recommending new clothing.
We designed a separate stylist platform integrating client conversations, project statuses, reviews, and income details.
The Perpetual team was very helpful in explaining their rationale for different design decisions. They delivered the work on time and within budget. We were really happy with the overall experience.
Through a strategic partnership with Perpetual, Curia successfully transitioned from an initial proof-of-concept into a highly differentiated, user-centric AI styling platform.
By conducting extensive research, we were able to identify a strong, user-backed path forward for the product. Our efforts have ensured a high-quality user experience for shoppers looking to get more out of their closets.
