MILK Shirts — designing for luxury market

5 min readOct 6, 2017

MILK Shirts is a new player to the world of luxury male dress shirts. With the help of already well established brands such as Rolex, Maserati and Fairmont Hotels, we’ve positioned MILK as an essential item in every successful man’s wardrobe.

Web design:

1. Designed with aesthetics and usability in mind

Website features only two menu systems (header and footer) making it extremely easy to navigate. Whenever it detects that the browser window is big enough in size (vertically), the entire header portion “sticks” to the top of the screen, giving the user an all-time access to the main menu as well as the checkout button — the single most important action trigger of any e-commerce website.

2. Animation as a means to trigger action

To further improve on the above, we’ve decided to utilize some subtle animation on the checkout button. Once products are added to the cart, the word “checkout” starts fading in and out — try it out. Animation in this case serves as a good way to attract the user’s attention.

3. Organic Search Engine Optimization

The best combination of keywords and phrases has been researched and implemented throughout the website to better the chances of ranking higher organically in search engines — without sounding like this website was built for robots (aka Google). For example, the index page contains some of these keywords in a heading tag (H2) as well as in all the required META tags.

4. Conversion Optimization Through Multivariate Testing

MILK was set up with testing in mind. We’re able to determine which combination of keywords and/or graphics gets the highest conversion to further improve the website. Current banner was selected as the highest performing as it accomplishes several tasks: states a clear purpose of the website, showcases the product, contains indexable keywords and directs users to product pages.

5. Ease of Access to Important Information

Users don’t have to spend a lot of time looking for important general information about the store. Things like shipping, returns, accepted payment methods and contact information are consistently located at the bottom of each page, resulting in less confusion and more reassurance.

6. Building Trust Online isn’t an Easy Task

If you are not creating a sense of security online, you will have a hard time gaining peoples trust in your business. Having a high quality product presentation, along with third party security verification, positions MILK Shirts as a trustworthy company that it is.

Brand Consistency and Recognition

Website design was inspired by the idea of in-store MILK Shirts product display that would create an unmistakable recognition for the brand. Beside is a rough concept sketch depicting this display inside of Derks — another client of ours who specializes in luxury menswear retail (with physical locations).

Quality and Attention to Detail

We seriously have not seen more interesting white dress shirts of such high quality before — and we really tried to portray this while working on this project. Over the years we’ve also noticed that websites full in rich detail have higher click-though rates and MILK isn’t any different. With 48.86% bounce rate (numbers that you don’t generally see in e-commerce shops), users are genuinely interested in exploring the website.

Photography & Post-production

The project was a collaborative effort with some of our good friends.

Ryan Connors and Nick Crocken helped us out with a big chunk of photography, while Brian Ceci was responsible for the video.

Overall, this project consisted of about 15–20 people.

We’ve decided to use Maserati Quattroporte GT as one of the main props as we felt that it best conveyed the feeling of the successful professional.

Everything was shot over a very short span of only 3 days at the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel, the beautiful Stanley Park, and the trendy Gas Town.

Our friends over at Derks Formals (who also happen to be one of our oldest clients), were kind enough to lend us over $20,000 in suits and accessories that you see in all the photos.

This helped us keep project costs lower for MILK Shirts.

Mandy Bilous, the Head of Marketing for Derks Fine Group of Companies, also flew out with us to Vancouver to make sure that everything was going smoothly and that the suits looked perfect once fitted on models. We love our clients!

Tomasz Jablonski of Aqomi was instrumental in facilitating the client relationship, the photo shoot effort itself and has helped me with creative direction as well as storyboarding.

Great effort.

Legendary collection of people.

Where to find me online:

I document quite a bit on my personal blog: www.yuriysklyar.com