holden outerwear, great use of video for online product marketing..
September 27th, 2007 by Dave Allen
I dropped by John Winsor’s blog where I found a post (via Josh Spear) about the Holden Outerwear website and its use of video as way to have the customer truly interact with the site. As he says, the site is alive and addictive. David Nakamoto had a hand in building the site, that’s the Portland connection.
September 27th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
i disagree. it would have been much much better if i had a way of viewing whole catalogue rather than having to sit through a rather dull video ( i was look at t-shirts) - bad usability. having said that, i do like the use of the video i just think they haven’t really thought about the user.
September 27th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
and I have to disagree back. to repeat what other online stores do - models posing in static pics, or jpegs of products - is just dull in my mind. I would argue that an online customer goes to a site like Holden’s knowing what they want to purchase, say a men’s jacket. Clicking on the Holden’s mens jackets link gives you a better experience than just a flat static image IMHO…
September 28th, 2007 at 11:26 am
If Holden do the same ole same ole in a cluttered market they too would just be, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I was talking to Mikey LeBlanc last night and it just slipped out of my mouth ” I was WATCHING your website last night” and it downed on me that in a unique way, Holden has made an impact on my brain. We “surf the web” we “scroll thru a website” but the idea of watching a website is what they have achieve. I am excited to go to EXIT REAL WORLD locally and check out anything Holden has. Granted, it is possible to make a catalog page to sell the product, could it be the goal was to get buy into the brand first?
September 29th, 2007 at 7:24 am
@Dave - I am not saying that is it wrong to have video, I really like the idea actually and thought it quite refreshing because of the reasons Trevor mentioned, ie it’s different. But I do think the execution could be worked on.
When I was looking at the tshirts video it took so long to see only 2 shirts. Because video is a linear format I had to wait until the whole video loaded to see the other shirts. The web is not a linear format and people want to be able to jump around quickly… well I did :-)
What would be better is to offer a way of jumping between shirts, perhaps a chapter system?. The video is served in flash so there is the perfect app to allow for interaction.
@Trevor - I live in London so I can’t check out their products in store and because I found their site frustrating I probaby wouldn’t buy from them. If the goal was just branding they have just left me feeling frustrated and as the first 2 shirts I saw I didn’t like they’ve lost me as a customer. So no sale and a bad user experience.
September 29th, 2007 at 10:41 am
I think it’s interesting that here we are discussing the website and its accessibility, ease of use etc and all the time the brand is being etched into my mind. Whether I shop on or off-line, this season I will be looking to upgrade my snowboard jacket and guess what, Holden is way up front in my mind…I also noticed that at Nemo Design, where I spend my day, two employees had independently sent out the link to Holden as a ’site to check out’…something’s working
September 29th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
It would be interesting to see how sales compare with the new site vs the old one.
September 29th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
That’s a very good point…