Located on Vancouver’s trendy Granville Street, GRAIL is a new retail concept store with a focus on “sneakerhead” culture and products.
To compliment the physical store, Art & Science built a clean, minimalist, mobile-first website—one that keeps the focus on the kick-ass kicks.
Like many of our retail clients, GRAIL came to us with an inventory, a physical storefront, and the faintest outlines of a brand identity.
Working closely with our client and their brand partner, we co-created a fresh brand with a modern, mobile-first website that emphasizes SEO and discoverability.
Designed to build hype around product launches, and drive traffic to the store, the site features a calendar of “upcoming drops”, in-store event listings, and a full catalog of in-stock sneakers.
Despite their humble beginnings, we were able to position our client as an established, authentic player in a highly competitive space. Deep research on sneakerhead culture and purchasing behaviours, along with competitive analysis and SEO research, armed our team to make smart decisions designed to appeal to the target demographic.
In fact, our SEO team was involved at every phase of the design and development process, helping to optimize the site not only for online search results, but local foot traffic too.
Deceptively simple on its face, the site includes a few unique features under the hood.
For example, given that our target demographic is 16-30 years old, traditional email marketing communications would have fallen flat, so we built a custom SMS messaging solution.
Our SMS system allows GRAIL to reach their audience in a more culturally relevant way by scheduling and broadcasting text message alerts for upcoming sneaker launches, exclusive parties and other in-store events.
We also crafted a robust import tool that allowed our client to automatically populate the site’s extensive catalog with relatively little effort.
Less than one year after launch:
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