Sseko founders Liz & Ben Bohannon know how to get creative to achieve their mission.

Sseko Designs: Six Months Later

September 2013 brought the end to JumpStart—our campaign to award $100,000 in agency services to the emerging company who demonstrated the greatest need by delivering the best pitch. 30,704 unique visits, 7,513 votes and 34 qualified entries later, Sseko Designs emerged as the victor.

How did Sseko win? Simple, they have one of the most inspiring missions we’ve seen in years. This small company is rebranding Africa by using fashion to empower women through education and career opportunities. Just spend two minutes of your time with this video and you’ll understand what can influence a vote.

For me, the story is especially meaningful. Two years prior to meeting Sseko, I was fortunate enough to travel through Uganda, where Sseko employs women who have more aspiration than opportunity. Traveling the countryside, I experienced the challenges of life that runs rampant through this impoverished east African country.

School is out for the day for young Ugandan children, but without a future opportunity, school will soon be out permanently.

The Project: Ssekodesigns.com

Fast-forward six months. Sseko Designs is flaunting a brand-spankin’ new website that will help take the small startup business to an enterprise-level ecommerce presence with the tools to go up against some of the biggest brands in the fashion industry.

Our Objectives

Ssekodesigns.com started with a rigorous business discovery, which identified short and long-term business objectives, brand strategy, target audience, project requirements and success metrics.

Sseko knows its customer. She is a 20-something fashion-conscious urban dweller who is inspired by art, globally aware, and knows what she wants out of life. With our market and business objectives in place, we crafted a digital strategy that inspires our customer while offering products that she can get excited about.

Together, with Sseko, we developed the right tools to support their short-term objectives while offering long-term scalability.

Brand Experience First

Despite being handcrafted at the highest standard of quality and materials, Sseko’s sandals, bags and accessories would quickly become lost in the market without the brand story standing behind every product. As a result, honoring the story is objective number one. A comprehensive brand discovery guided every detail of our design strategy right down to the use of color, font selection adn careful choice of lifestyle imagery.

While Blue Collar led the design process, we must give credit were credit is due. For a small company with limited resources, Sseko has somehow managed to develop a library of video and custom images that simply makes our job easy.

Playing in the Digital Market

Sseko relies on the website as the cornerstone of their marketing effort. Pretty pictures are nice, but it’s all for nothing without a proper marketing infrastructure in place.

Digital marketing firm, Swellpath Interactive was our partner agency in the Jumpstart campaign. They developed an SEO and Analytics strategy, which informed information architecture for project accountability and search optimization. From there, we developed a site plan that includes a user experience offering maximum reach through social integration and email database growth.

Let’s Sell Some Stuff

Ah yes, let’s not forget that thing that keeps the motor running and African women heading to university. Anything less than an upward trend in on–site conversion would be unacceptable. So what inspires our customer to buy? For the most part, they need to understand the Sseko story. In addition, it is many of the same things that inspire an online customer to buy an auto part or baseball mitt.

Ecommerce strategy is more of a marathon than a 5k sprint. For a small company that can’t afford to take risks, we stick with the proven conversion tactics that were pioneered and perfected by industry-leading e-tailers. From there we took some liberty by peppering in the Sseko brand story throughout, to ensure that every site visitor has an opportunity to become inspired.

Community Engagement

Does every Sseko have a story? We think they have earned the right to say yes. Meet Liz Forkin Bohannon and see what inspires her to make a difference in East Africa. Learn about Sseko’s mission, meet the Ugandan women behind the product or read up on the Sseko blog to get a glimpse behind the scenes.

Liz’s family, 10,000 miles away.

The Build

We collaborated with Sseko’s long-time web development partner, Rain Tomorrow Design, on the front and back-end development effort. Our hats are off to agency principal Jake Lisby, who provided a custom development platform which honors the brand strategy and provides a scalable ecommerce platform that will grow with Sseko’s business for years to come.

Leveraging non-proprietary open-source platforms WordPress and Magento, Sseko can manage all of its content remotely, while maintaining the user experience and design standards that were set to ensure a consistent the brand and product shopping experience.

The Future

The Jumpstart prize has been satisfied and our project is now complete. However, like the customers whom Sseko inspires every day, we intend to do our part to help build awareness for Sseko—and support the education and empowerment of women around the globe.