May 7th, 2008
Coolspotters: Where people and products meet
Last year, Mike D introduced me to a friend of his who had just started work on an exciting new project. Coolspotters, the first major project from Fanzter was built on the back of a simple concept: combine products and people and let the users create the connections.
Social Shopping
Of course, the idea of social shopping isn’t a new one. Just look at Amazon for example. The majority of my purchasing decisions on Amazon are based upon the reviews and recommendations of those products. But, Coolspotters does something new. It places the products in context to their useage with celebrities. For many aspirational brands, it’s this that defines them. Not the product itself, but who it’s being bought by, and who’s using it.
The Coolspotters launch UI. The revision includes a lot of work subsequently done by Fanzter based on our initial design concepts.
More than just another social app
The interesting potential for Coolspotters is that it becomes a repository for those transitory trends of fashion. So, in time, you could look back and see who were the early celebrity adopters of the iPhone, or which car was in vogue for last Autumn. All of this data could be mapped and charted to possibly show some interesting trends in how brands infiltrate and work through this highly-public, and influential, sector of society. That is something I’d love to see exploited.
My involvement
The challenge given to Mark Boulton Design was to craft the user experience and concept (together with branding) which could then be honed further by the talented Fanzter development team. We’ll have more about this shortly in a short case study on the studio site.
Coolspotters launches later today. You can read a little more about it on Techcrunch.
Good work Mark (+team!). The signup page is pretty enough. Looking forward to an invite.
Very very nice … looks neat and well organised, good job :)
Nice concept of site, and nice design!
Celebrities > Musicians > Jessica Simpson
Musicians, lol.
Nice looking site, mind. Good luck to you all — I’ll keep an eye on it.
Curiously awaiting your case study, Mark.
Well.. the screenshot looks nice.. and i like the signup page.
Guess i’m joining the queue waiting for an invite.. sounds interesting ;)
Hi Mark,
Very nice work and Ill look forward to reading the case study.
I do have a comment/suggestion… When you are on a product page e.g. http://coolspotters.com/clothing/dsquared-mvp-hooded-sweatshirt it would be really useful to have a link to the product site so that I could buy it. I felt like the site was only taking me half way to my user goal and after finding something I liked I now have to go off and hunt it down!
Stemming from this, celebrity clothes carry celebrity prices which are out of most peoples budget, so you could have an area where users could upload a cheaper alternative to e.g. Jessica Simpson’s new Ray Ban glasses available at e.g. TopShop.
Thanks,
Andrew
Good made. Very userfriendly but my pop-ub-blocker peeped non-stop ;)
Cool girl!!!
Social networking in the “in” thing, plus this site have additonal features. Great concept.
Thanks for sharing such a nice site
Love it