The concept of translating a bricks and mortar store environment into a virtual world is something I’ve always wanted to see a fashion brand try, I’m burning to find out if changing the format of the endless boring ecommerce websites today would work!? I would hazard a guess that considering today’s web-savvy shopper, the new tools we have available and if thoroughly thought through and very well designed, it just might! However, what I have witnessed today has made me question myself.
The brand that has taken on the challenge is Marc Jacobs. Initially I was told about this website by a team of creatives I work with. They were laughing about whether it was a joke? Or had the site been hacked? When I asked why, they said because it looks like a cartoon of an actual shop with actual store characters and speech bubbles. Immediately my burning question came to mind, secretly wishing, hoping and praying they were wrong and the amazing brand that is Marc Jacobs had taken on the challenge and succeeded…
I was wrong.
When I first landed on marcjacobs.com my initial feeling was that the homepage was pleasant. The ‘cartoon’ building is grand, pretty and it’s clearly a store. When I looked again I saw the “window displays” had videos in them and I immediately thought “tacky”. My opinion grew as I noticed the cheesy cartoon character with the speech bubble saying “Welcome to Marc Jacobs, please come inside”. Dare I go further?
Dare, I do…
The next page is an interior of a store, with more cheesy cartoon characters and their associated speech bubbles. It continues in this format throughout the website. Thankfully the product detail page isn’t an image of a checkout, but I wouldn’t have been surprised!
There is a “site credits” link on the footer. Create The Group is the agency that have done this (why they’d want to be credited to it, I don’t know) and looking at their portfolio its highly surprising. CTG were responsible for some world-class websites, so I can only hope and presume that this error of a website was the result of an overly ambitious client-side creative team who have no understanding or skills in web design.
For a low-end fashion brand, this might have been worthy of a “well done for trying” response and I’d see the humour in its effort, but what has begun to annoy me greatly is why would I want to spend $1,295.00 on a Marc Jacobs Tweed Fur Melange Bag when it looks like they’ve spent less commissioning an 8 year old child to design their website? You don’t walk into a McDonalds and be expected to dine a la carte, so why do Marc Jacobs think this kind of format for a designer online fashion store will work or be an acceptable platform for its customers to shop?
Lets just hope its an Marc Jacobs AW10 experiment and soon Marc Jacobs SS11 will be here and all will be forgotten…
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