M.Gemi
Handcrafted Italian Shoes
M.Gemi partners with Italy’s most sought after specialty factories to unveil stunning handcrafted shoes every single Monday. They are reinventing the luxury shoe category by helping the shoe-obsessed slip their feet into stylish high quality shoes at historically impossible prices. M.Gemi approached ribot to design and develop the iOS mobile application. The app launched in the Apple Store on 25th March 2015. The app is highly regarded by iOS users with an overall 5 star customer rating and is already the highest converting sales channel for M.Gemi.
The app incorporates an ‘edition’ cover panel. The concept is about weekly releases of limited editions. M.Gemi will release new shoes every week and retire them after just twelve weeks. The app has been designed to ensure it makes customers aware of the latest shoe releases, so they don’t miss out. Users are made aware a new Edition has been published, by a notification appearing on their device. The M.Gemi push notifications are opened at 4 to 5 times standard industry benchmarks. When a user opens the app they are shown the current ‘Edition’ cover panel. They can easily swipe upwards and see each new shoe elegantly showcased one by one. It’s all about the shoes. At this point in the browsing process, the user can swipe right to see a panorama of each shoe in different colours and positions, sharing the detail of each shoe.
The ‘browse’ section ensures shopping is quick and effortless. As you browse the shoes in the app, you can easily personalise your style, size and color choices. Making it quick and effortless to filter by color and size. You can find the perfect shoe in a shorter amount of time. Simply press the color button to display the entire color range or press size and either add your size or use the ‘fit assistant’. The menu includes the ability to search by ‘style’ so whether the user needs a ‘flat’ or a ‘bootie’, it’s easy to find. The shoes are the star of the show. The app features beautiful imagery of each and every product. We’ve integrated the Day-night component into the M.Gemi image gallery. As the product switches into night mode, the UI switches to dark mode, to enhance the sense of a time shift. This complements the product context.
We have designed a rich checkout experience. There is a very simple and clear call to action to pay. There is a one time sign up process for payments. Customers set up their account details when logging into the app and can add their credit card details manually or by using the camera to scan them. When the app has these details, future payments can be dealt with by a simple swipe.
We developed the M.Gemi app natively using Objective-C, with a strong focus on making the app experience smooth. We used a technique called constraints that allows us to scale the UI layout to all device sizes easily. We used layers to organise the code cleanly. The project was managed from three different locations. The M.Gemi team are based in Boston, our lead ribot designer for this project is based in Luxembourg and the rest of the ribot team were here in Brighton. We implemented a strict project management, launch and testing process for this app to co-ordinate across all three locations and time zones. The end result is a simply stunning user experience.
