Digital products for an international fabric supplier, from concept to working prototype

The context

Bru Textiles is a Belgian supplier of upholstery and curtain fabrics, with mostly business customers around the world. It buys fabrics, keeps them in stock in a huge warehouse and delivers them worldwide.

From 2017 to 2019 I worked there, first as a user experience architect for the digital marketing platforms, which ran on Sitecore. Working in Scrum, I came up with and designed new features, followed their development and tested what was delivered. I also investigated issues, wrote documentation and taught the webmasters how to work with the platform. Over time the focus moved to design, prototyping and product ownership.

I owned the functional design of the webshops: for businesses, and for consumers, such as More Fabrics, More Curtains and SofaHost. I wrote specifications, user stories and detailed mock-ups for an external development partner, managed the backlog and sprint planning together with the manager, worked with the developers and the testing team, and checked delivered features with acceptance tests.

I worked on more projects than the ones below, but mostly I did the same: work out the concept, design the user experience, build a working prototype in code and test it with users, before anything was developed.

Fabrics you no longer need to photograph

Bru was working on a large initiative to make fabrics digital: render them as digital fabric, apply them to digital furniture models and show them in interior scenes. With so many fabrics that is an enormous undertaking, but the gain is large too: less real photography, and customers who can show their products in any fabric, any colour and any setting. This was well before the age of AI. The renders were made by a digital team in Ukraine.

From the marketing team in Belgium, I designed the first presentation website for the initiative and built it as a prototype: the services, the quality of the renders and a gallery.

And a sofa you put in another colour with one click.

FibreGuard: a website for stain-resistant fabrics

FibreGuard is one of Bru’s brands: stain-resistant upholstery fabrics, where most stains come out with water. The brand needed a new website. I designed it, starting with the home page and its images from real life: children, pets, something knocked over.

Then the pages on where the fabric is used.

And on care, with a cleaning guide that shows how to get a stain out.

An agency built the site, and that ran in Scrum too. I broke the work down into tickets, tested what was delivered and followed the agency’s demos, until the site was done.

More Fabrics and More Curtains: fabrics and curtains for consumers

More Fabrics sold fabric by the metre to consumers, straight from Bru’s warehouse. It started as a trial within the company and ran well for several years. For that existing webshop I proposed a great many improvements to the user experience, and had them built through Scrum.

More Fabrics also wanted to innovate, and came up with a new idea: More Curtains, ready-made and made-to-measure curtains. It was also an application of the digital fabrics: the curtain in the configurator is a digital fabric that can hang in the room in any colour.

I created the concept and the prototype of the webshop. At its heart is a four-step configurator (colour, lining, style and measurements), with a price overview that updates as you go.

Around it: a catalogue with filters, a product page with all the details and a four-step checkout.

For every design choice we were unsure about, I wrote down a hypothesis and an alternative. Does a sticky header help? Should the configurator sit left or right of the photos? What comes first on the home page? In the prototype you could switch each variant on and off, so we could test them with users.

SofaHost: the showroom in people’s homes

SofaHost turned the furniture shop around. People who bought a sofa could let other interested buyers try it out at home, and earned a commission when those bought one too. With no shop in between, the sofas came straight from the manufacturer and cost less. They were upholstered in FibreGuard, so stains were no worry. I helped shape the concept and made the original design; the project was later taken further by others.

A stock system for a huge warehouse

I worked behind the scenes too. For the internal stock system, which ran the warehouse and gave insight into it, I did the functional analysis and the design.

The common thread

Across all these projects my role was the same: turning an idea into something you can try out. I worked out the concept, designed the user experience, built a prototype in code that really worked and tested it with users. And then I stayed with it: I wrote the specifications and user stories, followed the build in Scrum, with an external development partner or an agency, and tested what was delivered. That meant less building on guesswork, and a team that knew early on whether a product would work for the people who would use it.