Designing a Fashion Community

Image courtesy of Poshmark.

For some, developing a personal style is effortless, while others need a bit more help or simply enjoy exchanging fashion tips and tricks with others. If you’ve ever wished that you could raid the closet of a friend or colleague, then Poshmark just might be for you. Poshmark is the fashion destination for the social media generation. It’s about more than online shopping—it’s about connecting people who have a shared passion for fashion.

Since 2011, Poshmark members have been buying and selling items that they don’t need or just don’t wear—and they’ve built an entire fashion community in the process. Shoppers browse the sellers’ “closets” by scrolling, liking, commenting, and sharing posts, and following members whose style they just can’t get enough of. Each week, sellers upload more than $100 million worth of inventory to the social commerce platform, which features 75 million items for sale from more than 5,000 brands.

Image courtesy of Poshmark.

Designing for fashion-conscious users

As a platform created around fashion, Poshmark knows a thing or two about good design. Using Adobe Creative Cloud, the design team creates an experience that combines both form and function. The design team is always thinking about how to facilitate social interactions, so people feel connected to the community.

“From a technology standpoint, we’re always innovating and creating new tools for our community that make it easy and fun for buyers and sellers to connect and help each other succeed,” says Marie West, Senior UX Manager at Poshmark.

In addition to using apps such as Adobe Photoshop for image adjustments and Illustrator for creating icons, the team has added Adobe XD and Creative Cloud Libraries to its toolset to improve both design efficiency and collaboration.

Image courtesy of Poshmark.

When the team first started working with Adobe XD to concept new features, they found it to be a fast and easy way to create wireframes, mock ups, and prototypes. Today, Adobe XD is used to design new features and tools for the Poshmark community. For example, recognizing that many shoppers want help finding that perfect look, Poshmark introduced Stylist Match, where shoppers can request to be styled and sellers become stylists who share and curate items for their followers. Today, there are 4 million Seller Stylists on Poshmark.

“We created a whole new experience for community members,” says Marie. “The styling experience is integrated into the app and ties in with existing features. We used Adobe XD to create a proof of concept, showed the prototype on the phone, and easily brought our stakeholders along in the design process.”

Image courtesy of Poshmark.

Sharing designs with ease

Instead of saving each screen as an image and sending it around for review, the team simply creates a link that everyone can access. Stakeholders from the engineering team to the CEO can follow the design evolution, and designers save time by not having to export their entire project each time. Sharing in this way also supports greater company-wide collaboration and faster feedback.

“Whenever we introduce a new feature, we create a new Creative Cloud Library with all of the icons and other design elements so we’re all in sync,” says Marie. “We also use Adobe Creative Cloud to share our designs with each other and with others in the company.”

Of course, design is a process, and not every idea is going to hit the mark the first time. With Adobe XD, the team can “fail quickly” and move forward with valuable feedback. The process of generating a prototype previously took a whole day, but it’s now completed in minutes. And the design team can update repeating elements across artboards and integrate feedback throughout the process and see immediate updates.

Image courtesy of Poshmark.

Adobe Stock adds variety to promotions

Recently, the design and marketing teams also started using Adobe Stock for promotions and advertisements. The team saves images and vectors for a particular project in a library, and once the creative concept is approved, they purchase and download the file.

“It’s been really helpful to have Adobe Stock because we can easily share what we’ve saved and what we’ve downloaded so everyone has access,” says Marie. “We really like the variety of content in Adobe Stock, including vectors and video.”

As the platform continues to grow, the company remains focused on creating user-friendly experiences that make buying and selling fashion fun, interactive, and successful for members. Adobe XD will continue to play a primary role in helping the team iterate on existing experiences, design new features, and create additional ways to nurture interactions within the community.

This post was originally published on May 31, 2018. An update was made on January 22, 2019.