Material Exchange wants the fashion industry to source efficiently and more sustainable
I joined Material Exchange just before raising Series A round (20 million Euros). In addition to the development of the digital platforms, in total 3 service agencies were acquired and needed to be integrated. They’re acting as a link between brands and suppliers.
My Role
As Head of Design, I was responsible for assessing, leading, and building a design team to deliver products in a complex industry with many stakeholders, all working with inefficient tools. I reported directly to the CPO (who was later replaced by a new Product Principal, then a CPTO). Initially, 3 designers reported to me which changed to 2 Senior Product Designers after restructuring and hiring later.
Highlights from 3 Years
- Changing how the product designer role was viewed within the company.
- Identifying and correcting false assumptions, leading to improvements in both the product and business strategy.
- Evolving the design language across multiple products, updates, and relaunches, in line with a new brand identity.
- Improving team collaboration and fostering a more user-centric approach.
The Beginning: Getting Started with the Team and Organisational Challenges
A few weeks in, it became clear that the design team lacked some basic product design skills. The business leadership, product, and dev teams weren’t aligned, and roadmap timelines were not being met. The process, while meant to be agile, was actually more like waterfall in practice. There were plenty of ideas in the backlog, but the marketplace wasn’t hitting the business goals.
To address this, I worked closely with each designer on projects while also sharing knowledge. I proposed changes to our workflow and implemented them where possible. For the product itself, I suggested defining a funnel to track where we were losing customers and understand why.
Shortly after we raised Series A, the business strategy shifted and teams were restructured. Around the same time, it was decided to refresh the brand identity – a project I led alongside the CMO.
Strategy Change: From One Market Place to Three New Apps
The change in business strategy shifted the focus to our in-house agents, making them the key drivers in bringing their network of brands and suppliers onto the platform which now consisted of three distinctive apps: One each for brands, agents and suppliers.
To make this transition quickly, we brought in an external software solution. The first task for the design team was to create a new design language and design library that aligned with the newly developed brand identity.
Here’s a small selection of what that looked like:
Research: Interviews Reveal Strategy Gaps
After the relaunch, we conducted customer interviews, which revealed that one of the key reasons for the product shift – ‘Brands want to work with a service agent’ – wasn’t fully reflected in how suppliers’ revenue was distributed. In fact, most of the revenue came from working directly with brands. As we continued gathering feedback over the next 18 months, more issues with the strategy emerged, and it became apparent that agents weren’t able to bring brands onto the platform as hoped.
Research: Using Data
On top of this, marketing campaigns weren’t driving the expected activity on the platform, and the funnel showed a significant drop-off right on the landing page. When we looked into the issue, we found that the landing page wasn’t providing enough information for users to understand the value of ‘unlocking’ the showroom. It turned out the page was built on an incorrect assumption: that suppliers didn’t want to share material details publicly for fear of competitors copying them. This was disproven in supplier interviews. We fixed the issue by updating the user journey, adding more relevant material information, creating intuitive conversion points like a ‘Request Sample’ button, and updating the main CTA.
Another time, I analysed customer screen sizes using our analytics data. The designs were optimised for large screens, which caused problems for users with smaller screens. The data also showed a clear difference between user types and revealed that brand users mostly started their first journey on mobile. This insight led us to adopt a mobile-first approach for the brands app, ensuring a better first impression and improved conversion.
AI: The Birth of Frank
The product’s AI initiative was accompanied by a marketing campaign featuring a bear named Frank. For the fashion trade shows, we created a touchscreen kiosk app with animated versions of Frank to capture attention and encourage visitors to browse the available materials from the show digitally. The chat style user interface was a hint at what would come next: A new product and business strategy to leverage the latest advancements in AI technology and the abilities of modern LLMs.
Things I have learned
- Leading a remote team and emphasising the importance of communication to keep everyone aligned toward the same goal.
- Hiring and retaining talented senior designers in a challenging environment.
- Using Figma and a centralised library to ensure efficiency and consistency across team members and products.
- The importance of checking for biases and assumptions at every level.
- How conducting user and stakeholder interviews not only helps solve complex problems and uncover hidden issues but also contributes to the overall business strategy.
- The value of having a UX Playbook.
Addendum: A New Brand Identity
After raising Series A, an initiative to create a new corporate website was the right window of opportunity to fix some previous branding experiments. Together with the new CMO, we created a fresh Material Exchange brand identity, aiming to visually capture and combine technology and fashion.
To present a complete view of this new direction, we created a style board showcasing the ideas across different areas. The logo was slightly modified, a new colour palette was introduced, and we created a brand bible to promote the ideas, its values and the right usage.
