need serious help on a client UX school project

Hello fellow UX or aspiring UX designers,

Our school project client is currently designing for a sneaker brand called “Veja”. They’re a European sneaker company that sources the most ecological and sustainable materials possible to make for their shoes. We’re currently targeting the problem of “differentiation” for them to differentiate them from other sneaker companies and sustainable wear. Our proposed digital design intervention is to target the shoes’ disposal phase on the customer/user journey since for such a sustainable company, they don’t have a recycling program which makes the disposal phase misaligned with their brand values. We want to design a potential recycling program in the form of a digital channel for them.

The problem we encountered is that we don’t know how the customer / user would even be able to bring in or recycle their shoes due to them not having their own stores and only selling through third-party retailers. We looked at how other companies did this program such as Puma and Levis and they were able to put recycling bins in their stores but Veja doesn’t have their own stores.

At this point, we don’t know how to go about designing for the user’s shoe disposal process through a digital intervention due to this problem and we’re super stuck. Open to any ideas or input relating to this topic

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Hi there,
Hmmm, this sounds more like an issue of logistics than UX. I’m not really sure what to suggest here!

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Such a great challenge!
So let me see if I got it, you want to reinforce the sustainability values of the company that I believe is related to user values, you want to do that by designing a solution to disposal shoes for recycling and that solution is something digital. VEJA doesn’t have a physical store, so your problem is how to facilitate the disposal of shoes. Is that correct?

Well, I don’t want to give you ready to go solutions but maybe it can help to spark some ideas.
You could zoom in the disposal journey to find some needs & actionable insight, don’t focus on shoes only. You found the gap but I assume you still doesn’t know the problems behind it. I believe that most problems would be related to the logistics as @HAWK mentioned and the effort it demands from the users.

That would give more direction to a benchmark, if you can’t have the stores maybe you can manage to be at least a facilitator. Where I live you can find some good companies solving logistics (Rappi, Loggi, iFood and even Uber). Their solutions are about to connect users to the final end, and you can do that in different levels.

Let me know if it helps! :smiley:

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