The relationship with Cole Haan began with an assignment to help brand and package a new collection—Cole, Rood & Haan—aimed at younger, image-conscious consumers and sold at specialty retailers. From there, it blossomed into a collaboration that crossed media and channels, from brand strategy and positioning to website, visual identity, advertising, and catalogs.
Every touchpoint encouraged Cole Haan consumers to build a style that disrupted tradition and fueled their individualism.
The work included
Digital Strategy
eCommerce
Brand Strategy
Visual queues
Campaign Strategy
Research & Usability Testing
User Experience Design
Creative Direction
case study
Cole Haan
A global lifestyle brand, Cole Haan is about the world of classic style and sophistication, modernity, and irreverence—a juxtaposition that’s entirely by design. Its consumers are considered creative pioneers of an individual American style.
Accelerate the digital path to purchase.
To support its ambitious growth goals and tap into a younger, urban consumer target, Cole Haan needed an e-commerce experience that combined technical functionality with a design and voice that told a better story. To improve conversion rates, features were designed to accelerate checkout while still capturing shopper data and creating a personalized shopping experience.
Balancing e-commerce goals with brand priorities. The trick was finding the right balance between business objectives and customer experience—specifically, how to follow commerce conventions to help meet conversion and revenue goals while still delivering ownable and differentiated interactions that strengthen the brand.
This led us to a complete redesign of the e-commerce site, defining a new membership program and introducing an editorial strategy. The site’s conversational content and fluid experience follow a principle of technical humanism that reflects Cole Haan’s own product-design ethos. This ensures that the advanced technology of Cole Haan shoes is captured as a benefit to consumers while emphasizing lifestyle cues—everywhere from the promotional campaign through post-purchase follow-up.
The redesigned needle logo is updated in sync with modern functionality, clean lines, and a custom, proprietary typeface. The packaging design choice reflects premium, the craft-based feel of the product line, and the new application of the logo.
The relationship with Cole Haan began with an assignment to help brand and package a new collection—Cole, Rood & Haan—aimed at younger, image-conscious consumers and sold at specialty retailers. From there, the task was to create a website that disrupted tradition and fueled individualism.
Featuring the work of photographer Todd Selby, the developed and designed site emphasizes Cole, Rood & Haan’s back-to-its-roots, vintage-inspired essence, and focus on New York City entrepreneurs.
