Company: Trunk Club

Worked on our “First Use” team to design and test a “curated outfits” feature based on machine learning to increase the rate of users receiving a “trunk” of clothes.

Problem

Trunk Club was a digital styling service that paired users with stylists to help them pick out outfits and clothes to send to them in a “trunk”. As a designer on the “First Use” team, we were responsible for the a new user’s experience from sign-up through trying on the first trunk of clothes.

Our main KPI was what we called the "taker rate", or the percentage of new users who would "take" home a trunk of clothes to try on. We were starting to learn from past research that there was a good segment of new customers that would drop off because they didn’t have enough time to talk with their stylist, which was normally required in order to see any clothes. We started to think how might we allow customers to see clothes faster?

Discovery

Of the past discovery research we had done with customers around their first experiences with Trunk Club, there were a few themes that came up:

• Some users don’t have enough time - normally after signing up, a new user is paired with a stylist and they have a conversation in real time for the stylist to further collect style information to create a trunk of clothes. Sometimes this conversation could be as short as five minutes but it could also go up to an hour, which didn’t fit some of the busier lifestyles of our users like stay-at-home parents
• Some users don’t want to talk with a stylist - we also learned that some users wished Trunk Club wasn’t so conversation based; users liked that they had a stylist they could go to, but wished they had more self-service options or were shown clothes without having a real time conversation
• Expectations to receive good clothes are high because of the long sign-up flow - a common task we ask users is to go through the sign-up flow and ask how they feel about it, especially the length; most users don’t mind the 15-20 style questions we ask, but have higher expectations to receive good clothes because of this up front investment
• One of the biggest value propositions of the Trunk Club experience was the outfits the stylists put together - we learned that some of the most helpful advice users received from their stylists were outfit recommendations and how they could pair new clothes with their existing wardrobe