CHALLENGE
Black-owned businesses offer some of the best products and services Chicago has to offer, but they're not easy to find. When our partners at OKRP came to us with an idea to redefine Black Friday, we knew we could help.
SOLUTION
Our team crafted a prototype of the web app in just a couple of days, that we used as a foundation for what became blackshopfriday.com. We iterated on design, ideated on function, and built a web app that will serve our community beyond the campaign.
WHAT WE DID
Product Strategy
Web Design
Web Development
APPROACH
As always we took a collaborative approach to design and development. We iterated from wireframes to design with our partners in figma. When it came to development, we wanted to build a real web app that the City could use and the community could benefit from, beyond the campaign. Naturally, we chose Laravel, a light, fast PHP framework that's powerful enough to scale and support the growth and features we desired. We got to work and built the site in under a month.
CONCLUSION
There's no conclusion here. There's work to be done in our community and this is just our small contribution. We'll be building more features and working with the City and OKRP in the coming months to make this site even more useful. One thing first...We're going to take a shopping break and enjoy some of the amazing Black-owned businesses we learned about making this site.
CREDITS
It's no small feat to build something like this so the list is long and there's way more people who were behind the campaign. Tom O'Keefe, Matt Reinhard, Rahul Roy, Aubry Walker, Krysten Bedore and the entire OKRP team led the brand, global design and ideation of the campaign. Sabrina Siegel, Alexa Heitzman, Richard O'Donnell, Jeff Walker and John Geletka brought the site to life. Hats off to Sabrina who owned this effort on our team. Matt Staffuer, Jon Sugar and the Tighten team joined us to make this a fast, scalable and incredibly well programmed solution. The team at the City of Chicago provided support, data and guidance on this effort and Edelman got the word out.
“OKRP believes in actively partnering with specialized outside “agents” that can complement our skills, Geletka+ provided back-end expertise OKRP didn’t have in-house”
“”
Rahul Roy
