Project Brief

New clients, service usage, and sales were in decline at Seattle Sun Tan, year over year. To combat the dwindling tanning industry, Seattle Sun Tan diversified their services by adding spa and beauty related products to help increase their audience range. Although the market for these auxiliary services was increasing, Seattle Sun Tan was having difficulty gaining any traction. 

Our team’s goal was to generate ideas that would improve customer brand trust and increase new clients, service usage, and sales.

Process

Our team conducted surveys, interviews, and contracted a third party to analyze customer data to help us redefine the target market as well as potential markets within the region. The qualitative and quantitative data provided two key details—the region (King County) was diversifying faster than any other region in the US and existing customers were having difficulty trusting and associating Seattle Sun Tan with spa services because of the name.

Our team presented two ideas to stakeholders that would test a concept at one of the 35 Seattle Sun Tan locations, and could then be applied to additional locations upon success. 1) Rebrand a location focusing on spa and beauty services or 2) Create a micro-spa environment within a salon. Stakeholders agreed on testing the first option on the flagship location as it was already in-line for a remodel and Light Spa was born.

We pulled inspiration from spa competitors and the light therapy services—vibrant colors, high-end textures, bold type, and inclusive imagery to connect with the target audience. We worked with a medical professional to assess medical claims for each of the services, and help us develop copy and provide research to support our claims.

With our inspiration and medical professionals’ data, we were able to create a brand that exuded spa level quality through luxury textures, bold typography, and clean lines, and target new clients with a vibrant color palette and diverse lifestyle imagery. We refreshed print collateral throughout the salon—posters, signage, brochures, and direct mailers.

Our team wanted to provide customers with education and benefits when subscribing to Light Spa’s email list. We produced 50+ automated campaigns in the first year to provide service info, purchase funnels, customer rewards, and invitations to exclusive events for top customers.

To provide customers with a better digital experience, we evolved our existing sitemap from Seattle Sun Tan to give multiple entry points into each service. Customers could search or navigate by service name, medical condition, and brand, to see detailed information about each service, footnotes with medical research to support each claim, and recognizable brands to help build trust.

In order to quickly gain buy-in from the stakeholders, we went directly into high-fidelity wireframes of the website. In conjunction with designing these wireframes, I art directed an on-site photoshoot of the services, to help provide a more relatable digital experience to the services.

We defined the user flow of the booking tool based on the required actions to complete a successful booking. We kept it simple, including only the necessary components needed for a customer to book, and to make easily understood by the stakeholders.

Once we got approval from the team and stakeholders of the user flow, we developed a prototype of the booking tool to share with stakeholders and conduct usability testing with customers before taking it into final development and going live on the website.

View live prototype here.