Salvaged
Translating complexity into intuitive experiences that build trust
founding designer, e-commerce, search and discovery
Role
Collaborators
Independent Agencies
Albuquerque, Laila Joy (Founder, Designer) Sung Won choi (Co-founder, operations) Ali Shahman (Engineering support) Mimi (Social Media Strategist)
duration
tools
2022-2024
Figma, Shopify
Design
How the site evolved over 1.5 years from a Shopify templated featuring university dorm photographed apparel to the city’s fastest growing online thrift store
Passive User Flow
Boosts discovery by placing high turnover products with minimal clicks
Active User Flow
Empowering users with granular control to filter products
Optimised for unhappy path
If the user was uncertain about a product, they could schedule an in-person appointment. This converted potential customers and helped the team better understanding purchasing patterns.
Problem
By observing our user’s live interaction with the site, we were able to map the key pains with the platform
Decision Inertia
Browsing can be overwhelming due to a lack of anchoring for the product catalog, leading to excessive scrolling to find a good fit & cognitive load that may frustrate users
Low compatibility
The user journey lacks alternative offerings for the unhappy path where users are unable to find options in their size
Low brand value
As a new brand, users tend to be conservative due lack of trust and proven market value. They leave the site to check if there are similar or better items on other sites, bounce off and fail to return
Product Misunderstandings
Users create mental modals of the product’s texture and sizing from the product image, resulting in different reactions to the actual garment. In traditional retail, items are returned due to wrong fit (70%) or unmet expectations (20%). This only amplifies for thrift.
First principles: Curating thrift
Unconverted sales stem from lack of differentiation - A thrifted product is competing with every version of itself made by every brand. In this case, how we communicate and deliver quality - from cataloguing and info design - helps anchor the limitless potential of thrift and guide the user towards a valued purchase.
100 million clothes are made every year, how may we sort through styles worth saving?
Thrifting can’t compete with fast fashion on speed (the name says it all). By interviewing customers we discovered - Old competes with new by offering an irreplaceable quality, filtered out from the rough weathering of space and time, chosen and preserved by invisible hands of thrift stores and owners.
The opportunity lied in curating like an archeologist, the thrift experience is positively correlated to how streamlined quality discovery is.
Quality became the north star, where we weren’t defined by resale value, but what people would genuinely wear a second time around.
This north star broke down into 3 main goals:
Increase value of offerings
Create alternative conversion paths through bundles, curated collections and options to visit the warehouse in person → increase in AOV
‘everything within reach’
High-impact information e.g. size chart and in-person fitting is aligned with the logical flow of the user journey → % Check-outs without contacting the team
Enhance Product Discovery
Develop intuitive categorization for active discovery (search) and passive discovery (‘for you’ recommendations) → Successful check-outs from collection pages
Process
Allowing for non-standard paths
Thrifters and non-thrifters have polarizing shopping habits. We had to somehow support first-time thrifters without alienating our original thrifter customer base.
Active hunters
Every thrifter we spoke to were willing to look over pain points for the opportunity to find a ‘gem’.
Passive consumers
Non-thrifters are used to abundant choice from retail chains offering clothes in multiple sizes and color ways. They are expecting to be sold to, and unable to craft their own narrative.
Clustering collections
We had to rethink how to break down the catalog into intuitive collections. Traditional clothing categories like “shirt” created 200+ results of unrelated styles and shapes. Existing thrift stores filter by brand, price or trendiness, but this created impractically small search results. Our workaround was to further cluster by functionality, e.g. casual outerwear, day dresses.
Development - Phased migration
After the design and features were confirmed, I had to migrate to the new site while ensuring a seamless experience for live users. This was a challenge as the product data changes (images, tags, metafields) affected all site versions, including the live site.
Metafields for Search & Discovery
Added fields (e.g., color, category) for better filtering.
Bulk Editing
Used Shopify bulk editor to populate metafields.
CSV Updates
Edited product info in CSV for bulk changes.
Draft & Publish Workflow
Created a draft version of the new site for testing. Published draft after first product data phase, then made further adjustments in a second phase.
Launch
Published new site after all updates.
Post-Launch Refinements
Updated CSV and images incrementally (landing page → older collections).
Result
After shipping the redesign, we were able to
+87% people who landed on the app
+32% people who clicked on a product
+48% conversion in 'for you' section
+24% saved in time till purchase
+32% increase in AOV
+67% unreturned orders
Enhanced site branding helped grow engagement 1.6x through invitations to keynote events like Shenzhen Fashion Week, and BOF Asia
Early mockups of the new website were pitched at Sino 1 Million, which we finalized to secure 30K USD in initial funding
Design-led structure enabled us to experiment, fail and grow much faster - exploring 10+ different sources of preloved clothing, ~33% of which personally approached us via word of mouth or marketing.
Learning
The opportunity to run Salvaged was a gift of countless learnings
The power of design leadership
Power of design leadership product thinking, design-first entrepreneurship, user-research enabled us to develop a functional site sooner and helped with operational efficiencies, for example our inventory management system. I would often lead the team though white boarding exercises to get people creative and owning their responsibilities. I believe this enabled us to experiment bravely in a bearish, post-covid market.
With that said
Design can’t solve market inefficiency
Thrift represents a market problem beyond us - we could not compete on cost of operations with fast fashion (made cheap by unethical practices). Logistics and Marketing cost for one-of-one-pieces is not currently scalable (Please reach out if you’re working on an idea that may change this though!). Ideally, we could outsource the logistics to focus purely on personalizing the site experience - this worked for thrift giants like Reflaunt (outsourced to DHL) and ThredUp (robotics arm) - however, user acquisition also was not scaling for a niche like thrift.
Designing is saying no
As a first-time founder, this journey made me grow as a designer to prioritize. Although, I stopped working on the project after I shut down Salvaged to pursue product design full-time due to unresolvable operational inefficiencies, I still believe in the power of online user experiences in making circular products mainstream.
