Arthur Ashe
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Arthur Ashe was not only a legendary tennisplayer—he was the first black man to win the US Open, Wimbledon, and a slate of other history-making titles—but he was also a champion for civil rights at home and abroad, a style icon, and an American hero.
When the client looked to create a new lifestyle brand named in Arthur Ashe’s honor, the client also knew that they wanted the brand to follow in Arthur’s footsteps of harnessing fashion’s power to subvert, empower, and express the inexpressible. The brand would also have philanthropic partnerships with the Arthur Ashe Legacy Fund at UCLA which seeks to amplify Ashe’s unwavering commitment to social, political, and health-related causes through education, engagement, and empowerment. In other words, then, the challenge was to create a website for the clothing brand, but which would simultaneously celebrate Arthur Ashe’s achievements and honor his legacy.
The earliest design mock-ups were meant to be modern yet respectful, and drew on the existing Arthur Ashe logo and brand elements. Through the design process, we were able to enumerate additional features, such as videos on the homepage and a unique 4-up image gallery on product pages, which helped to tell the story of Mr. Ashe.
We built the site on Shopify Plus, with one key feature being internationalization. Shopify’s robust featureset allowed us to detect a user’s country and currency out of the box. We could then use that data to tailor the site so every user could natively experience the Arthur Ashe brand, and make purchases confidently in their home currency.
The site isn’t purely about commerce though; it features two key pages custom designed to tell the story of Ashe’s legacy on and off the court. The Legacy page is a biography of Ashe’s life, particularly of his life on the court, and a virtual museum in his honor. Meanwhile, the Social Impact page tell the stories of the organizations that aim to continue to fulfill the humanitarian promises that Ashe initiated during his lifetime.
The site also leverages other modern features, such as personalized product upsell recommendations and email marketing, two-way data sync with Avalara (for taxes) and NetSuite (for backend business processes such as fulfillment), and full integration with other sales channels such as Facebook.
Launched on August 26, 2022, just in time for the US Open, the end result is a site that lives up to Arthur Ashe’s outstanding legacy. The site is a dignified virtual shrine, with store purchases supporting Ashe’s organizations of social change.
