Aparelho Studio gives Osklen’s digital expression a glow up with a considered, layered website

Osklen, a Brazilian fashion brand, is known for two things primarily – avante-garde fashion and its commitment to sustainability and responsible practices in the fashion industry. The brand, which needed to pump life into its digital expression, reached out to Aparelho Studio to reimagine its website and shopping experience. For Aparelho, the work didn’t start exactly with the website, but with the identity. The team tweaked the identity to better meet the demands of a digital-first environment, swapped the brand typeface – taking it from an obscure version of Helvetica to a combination of Neue Haas Grotesk and Suisse Int’l – and redefined their brand imagery, providing a major update to product photography, stills, and lookbook imagery. Once these elements were set in place, the team began crafting the website, bringing in a sense of quiet luxury with its considered layout and swathes of white space. “Our design approach was rooted in Osklen’s ethos – a fusion of urban sophistication and strong environmental consciousness,” Creative Director Guilherme Boavista tells us. “While honouring the brand’s 30-year legacy was important, our focus was on creating a forward-looking digital presence that resonates with current brand ambassadors while also engaging a younger audience entering the luxury market, a key demographic where the brand was seeing poor performance.” In designing the website, the team sought to create a fine balance between storytelling and functionality. Not only did the website have to communicate a lot with a little when it came to allowing Osklen’s essence to take the lead, but also provide a seamless, friction-free experience for its shoppers. “E-commerce structures are known to be among the most rigid web architectures, as users of large high-performance stores need to follow a well-defined path in order to prevent conversion rates from dropping,” says Founder & Design Director Felipe N. Pinto. “This was also the guiding principle behind our decision to spend more time refining micro-interactions and detailed components, enhancing the sense of design quality and attention to detail, especially given the somewhat narrow canvas we were working with.” There was an equal effort to maximise the screen real estate for Osklen’s updated brand imagery, letting the products do the talking.