Designing an equipment customizer application for a leading Global Sports Apparel Brand

We collaborated with one of the biggest global sports apparel brands in the world to create an application that professional designers and sports persons could use to customise equipment like football gloves, chest guards, baseball fielding and batting gloves.

The existing process that our client used was very labour intensive and time-consuming as a result of the production process being affected by delays and human errors.

A few challenges that our app development team faced in the process of designing the application were:

1. Extracting and exporting layers from a file took up a lot of time.
2. The application's design had to be as close as possible to the actual equipment that would be manufactured.
3. The display canvas had to be visually appealing to elevate the entire experience that designers and players would have while interacting with the app. The layout had to be structured in a fun way to use.

‍

Our focus was on streamlining the design process so that the athletes directly got the ability to customise their equipment any way they wanted. We kept in mind that the app would produce the exact manufacturing specs for each order instantaneously. To achieve this, we employed a tech suite comprised of tools such as:

1. Mongo DB
2. Express
3. React JS 
4. Node JS

Keeping these two focal areas in our peripheral vision enabled us to save our client countless person-hours, reduce the chances of human errors and, most importantly, elevate our client’s credibility as a brand in the minds of the athletes.

We designed a unique interface for the designers at our clients’ end to make it easier for them to customise equipment for the athletes based on their team colours and logos. That interface also consisted of an order tracking dashboard. 

To further reduce the chances of human errors, we added an option for them to download PDFs of the designs curated, which they could directly share with their suppliers.

We built a dashboard-like interface called ‘Athlete View’ that would let the athletes directly choose from the designs that our clients in-house designers curated for them based on colour and logo choices.

‍

Our biggest takeaway from this project was the challenge we faced while adjusting the Die Casts in the application. Exporting the specs of each glove was another huge challenge. It was essential to get these two aspects right so the final product render would precisely like the customised elements included in the design.

We observed how comparatively easier it became for athletes to play around with custom elements on their equipment to give them the whole experience of designing truly personalised gear. From the placement of components to colour options, we enabled them to take complete control of the entire design spectrum and develop designs that fully represented their personalities.

‍