BAGS etc

In 2021, we initiated a project for Bags etc, a Ukrainian manufacturer and retailer of high-quality leather goods based in Dnipro.

It was not a typical agency engagement. I had been a customer of the brand for years, buying my first wallet, briefcase and case there, and had always appreciated the quality of their products. What stood out was the gap between the quality of the brand and the way it was presented online. We approached the management with a proposal to change that.

The existing website and CMS had become outdated, so our task was to create a fresh, lightweight and contemporary e-commerce experience without introducing unnecessary technical complexity. We kept the existing brand identity and content, and focused on UX/UI and the digital experience.

For a catalog of around 1,500-2,000 products, OpenCart was more than sufficient and could integrate seamlessly with the company's existing CRM. There was no reason to introduce a more complex technology stack simply for the sake of it.

The new experience was designed to communicate the quality and status of the products through clean UX, refined visual presentation and a more modern interface.

The project was completed at the UX/UI stage but was never launched. Communication with the brand stopped in 2022 following the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

Years have passed since those first purchases, and the wallet and the case still work exactly as well as they did on day one. That kind of quality is rare, and it is part of why the gap between the product and the online experience representing it felt worth solving in the first place.

The project never got to prove what the redesigned experience could have done for the brand. But the products it was built around are still doing their job, years later, with no redesign needed at all.

Concept