disturb launch kinnari.com
Over the course of the last 6 months, we've been working with Kinnari to help them launch their new jewellery brand.
Kinnari and their community of users collaborate together to evolve jewellery designs that are tailored to each individual user's taste; the credit for being the designer of the resulting creation can be equally shared between the brand and the user.
Therefore, it's quite a different relationship to most B2C brands - obviously a transaction takes place for the production of the goods, but the bespoke nature of the journey to arrive at the purchase leaves users feeling a lot less of a consumer and more a creator.
From a digital agency's point of view, this was a fantastic project for disturb to be involved with. Firstly, we were thrilled to be awarded the job of designing the brand's identity - a process with which the brands founders were extremely closely involved. We feel that the end result is an identity that really captures the simplicity and elegance of the brand without stealing the show from the jewellery, which does a very good job of selling itself visually.
The design of the site then really fell into place. We wanted to create a sleek, uncluttered vehicle for the presentation of the visually rich content. Jason Turner, digital designer at disturb said "The first challenge in designing the Kinnari site was about finding the right balance between the branding and the jewellery. I felt that the company identity shouldn't try to compete for attention with the jewellery, because the product certainly looks good enough to sell itself and the less clutter around it the better.
"The next challenge was around the navigation of the design tool. The experience itself is fun, but we didn't want to push this too much further with the look of the various controls and options, due to the risk of devaluing the premium feel. We netted out at a place towards the 'charming' side of fun, which I think is a perfect position for Kinnari."
On the development side, the highlight of the site build for us was the creation of the Design Tool. It allows users to immerse themselves into the creation process, changing the collection, base model, finish, gemstone colour and size, while seeing an updated 3D representation of their jewellery all the way through the process, as a 360° view that they control.
The fact that the site has been built to perform equally well across many devices and platforms is, most importantly, beneficial to Kinnari's community of users because they can design across tablet devices and smart phones as well as desktop PCs. It's something that's also beneficial to disturb because it's a great demonstration of our capabilities in this area and serves us well in our quest to dispel the myth that we're only about Flash!. Without getting too into the technical side, and just for those who are interested, the front end of the site is an HTML / Javascript build, making very good use of jQuery. The back end comprises of a Symphony CMS build and integration of the REALEX payment system.
This all makes for a really slick, enjoyable experience. See what you think and have a go at designing your own jewellery at kinnari.com
