Nike Air Troupe Design Battle
Once again, another fantastically concepted and executed site by Nike.
The Air Troupe Design Battle website has been created to launch a new range of Hip-Hop dance shoes that took over 2 years to develop.
Alongside the dance inspired developments of the shoe (more durable for multi-surface wear and 360-degree dragging/sliding) comes the ability to fully customise its look - everything from the colour of the laces through to the colour of the under-sole tread.
Once designed, you can purchase your shoe, send it into battle against other designers and judge other people’s creations.
Like all Nike sites, the Flash work is excellent and I particularly like the judging section - two opponents (shoes) are shown, and the user has three seconds to click on their favourite before the next challengers are displayed.
Offline shopping experience goes online
Imagine shopping online but still being able to browse the racks, drag items to have a closer look, and finally add them to your own rack of chosen goods before purchase.
Japanese website Hoop has done just this for their new online store. While I can’t read/understand much of what’s going on, the idea behind it seems pretty cool. Not sure if it’ll prove to be a success or failure for the customer, but good on them for giving it a try.
Website / Endless Shoes and Handbags
Endless is a recently launched (still Beta - like most web 2.0 offerings) new shopping site from the US - restricted to US localities at present including their prisons! The differentiator for this site is the inclusion of a nice set of search tools including visual devices such as a colour picker and drag-able sliders for setting price ranges. It’s not the most visually appealing site in the world and the ‘Endless’ brand really confuses me (why endless - what’s the tie, why the crap logo etc.) but the functionality and sensationally tight CSS control makes up for it.