the spark...

Haultastic Branding and Website

A new phenomenon has been taking over a corner of the internet. This craze has come to be known as ‘Haul’ videos and features young shoppers reviewing and comparing their latest purchases. It has gradually developed into something of an online sensation and continues to grow.

Brightspark was approached by two entrepreneurs who aimed to build a business directed at this valuable, young, cash rich market. The plan was to create a website that would consolidate these ‘Hauls’ and provide a forum for young ‘Haulistas’ to interact.

Their brief was to develop a brand that would be stylish, sassy and confident. It needed to appeal to a modern fashionista with a unique style that others wished to mimic.

The first stage was to design the logo. After much sketching, I created several versions that I felt would appeal to the predominantly young, female audience. A few examples are below:-

After a couple of tweaks, we arrived at the finished result.

The next step was to devise a site map and wire frames for each page. This would ensure that every aspect of the site was clear before any design began.

Beginning with the home page, I set out to create an extension of the clean, sophisticated lines of the logo. The client was very happy with the direction the site was taking and the remaining pages soon followed.

One of the key decisions in the build was determining how a Haulista would upload their video. A number of options were researched for the back-end method and for a while Revver API (third party software) was the favourite. Revver is a video sharing site which attaches adverts to clips and generates revenue for the creators. In theory this was ideal but in practice the API proved extremely clunky and above all, unreliable. Despite investing many days and hours integrating the API, it was decided that in the long term it would prove to be just too unstable.

As an alternative it was agreed that we would follow the far more simple embed route. Although this would remove the user revenue aspect, it did offer many advantages. In particular it provided stability and would be familiar to Haulistas from sites such as Facebook.

The site has now been successfully soft launched and can be found at www.haulastic.com.