BACK


OPPORTUNITY
PROCESS
CONCEPTUAL DIRECTIONS
RESULTS AND REFLECTIONS

HUGO & MARIE •  FALL 2020 - SUMMER 2021


Inviting consumers to the world of The Row  


OVERVIEW

The Row is an American luxury fashion label established by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in 2006. It has established itself as a leading force in the fashion industry. For nearly two decades, The Row has been shrouded in mystery, with no loud digital or physical presence. 

While at Hugo & Marie, I was consulting on both functional and visual components of The Row’s digital experience. I partnered with the brand’s development team to design, test and execute vital advancements of the live site and ideate future expressions

In parallel with defining the Instagram Stories system, I produced social and email content to support new collection launches, The Row’s monthly curated Spotify playlists, and a series of cultural showcases tied to the brand’s education initiative 

The work focused on interacting with The Row customer in a way that felt intentional, restrained, and brand-appropriate, prioritizing clarity and tone over overt marketing gestures. Each piece of content was designed to feel considered and curated rather than promotional, aligning with how The Row communicates across physical and digital touchpoints.

Although the visual language was minimal by design, the process itself was deliberately experimental. We A/B tested different story formats, typographic treatments, and content structures—iterating based on engagement and click-through performance to refine what resonated most with the audience.

This testing informed decisions around:

  • Type placement versus image dominance
  • The balance between editorial pacing and product clarity
  • When to reduce messaging entirely and let imagery lead

The result was a system that maintained visual restraint while quietly improving performance metrics, particularly CTR, over time.


SOCIAL, BUT MAKE IT THE ROW

Rather than treating Instagram Stories as promotional extensions of the feed, we reframed them as a secondary editorial space; closer in spirit to The Row’s newsletters, printed matter, and in-store communications.

This led to three guiding principles:

  1. Separation, not imitation: Stories should feel recognizably The Row, but not visually redundant with the feed.

  2. System over moment: every story needed to function individually and as part of a long-term, modular system.

  3. Restraint as differentiation: in a saturated, high-stimulus Stories environment, quiet becomes a competitive advantage.




Visual merchandising and curation on the e-com experience








Art direction and production of Instagram Story content for their 1.4M users at the time.

Newsletter curation and design

PROCESS

Working with a brand like The Row requires rigourous thoughtfulness, taste-making and visual research. Below is just a sneak peek into the process:


CURRENT TYPOGRAPHY
We began by auditing The Row’s existing typographic ecosystem across newsletters, system emails, mailers, show invites, and web experiences.



Product newsletters



Playlist newsletters


Show invitations
We had the following key observations:

  • Consistent use of neutral grotesques (primarily Helvetica) with disciplined hierarchy
  • Heavy reliance on white space and proportion, rather than decorative elements
  • Typography functioning as structure, not expression

This foundation made it clear that any Stories system needed to prioritize spacing, pacing, and alignment over visual novelty.


VISUAL AUDIT
A competitive audit of peer and adjacent fashion brands revealed a wide spectrum of Story behaviors: from aggressively branded templates, to almost entirely image-led approaches.



Balenciaga’s frequently place products within constructed or digital environments, using scale, contrast, and minimal captioning to foreground concept and visual staging over traditional product presentation. 



Celine approach is mirroring the brand’s editorial ethos by using cinematic imagery, repetition, and minimal typography to present femininity as understated, observational, and grounded in mood rather than overt narrative.



Acne Studios combine straightforward runway and product imagery with offbeat styling and graphic touches and minimal typography, reflecting the brand’s long-standing mix of fashion, art, and youth culture.



Loewe shifts between runway movement and intimate product close-ups to emphasize texture, craftsmanship, and color. The brand is known for flirting the lines between artisanal heritage and modern expression, and their Instagram presence reflects that.



Prada frequently combine runway and product imagery combined with both Instagram’s native typography tools and buttons, but also custom-branded labels and overlays, which keeps the presentation direct and platform-native. 



Helmut Lang rely on stark product isolation, neutral backgrounds, and minimal typography, which reflects the brand’s long-standing commitment to utilitarian clarity and modernist restraint.



Comme des Garçons lean toward a darker, more brutalist aesthetic, using stark and saturated imagery and restrained, utilitarian typography to reinforce a raw, concept-first approach to fashion presentation.



Gucci lean into a playful, eclectic mix of imagery and references, reflecting then-Creative Director Alessandro Michele’s maximalist approach. They also rely heavily on Instagram’s native typography and link features rather than a custom typographic system to prioritize immediacy, way-finding and shoppability.

From this audit, what stood out were the following:

  • Many luxury brands rely on scale, motion, or color saturation to claim attention
  • Typography is often treated as an overlay or an entry-point to PDPs rather than a compositional tool
  • Very few brands fully embrace negative space in Stories

This reinforced our belief that The Row’s restrained and quiet visual language, when executed with discipline, would feel radical in this context.

CONCEPTUAL DIRECTIONS
We developed three stylistic directions, each rooted in The Row’s brand DNA but pushing the system in different ways

DIRECTION #1: MINIMAL
The direction closest to The Row’s existing language:

  • White space as the primary design material
  • Reduced typographic styles
  • Title-case Helvetica and restrained hierarchy

This approach treats Stories as an extension of The Row’s editorial calm. By minimizing visual intervention, the product and photography remain dominant, while typography quietly frames meaning. Placement experiments (title above/below image, subtle lockups) allow flexibility without visual noise.



Typography lockups above and below pack shots and editorial shots


Shop the Look slideshow, with editorial and pack shots 


Playlist Story explorations 


Editorial layout with varying white space


Editorial layout with full-screen imagery and link to photographer


Close-up editorial videos with collection title and product names

Pure editorial with custom typography and bottom lockup

DIRECTION #2: TYPOGRAPHY PLAY

Here we explored a new direction when it comes to type size, alignments and general styling with a focus on the uppercase Akzidenz-Grotesk. Inspired by the ability to be more experimental in a Story context.


Centered, all-caps lockup combined with full-bleed and bordered pack shots



Oversized and colorful typography 




Handwritten notes





Editorial with all-caps typography

DIRECTION #3: COLORED APPLICATIONS
In addition to exploring more experimental typography shifts for Stories, we also explored introducing a subtle color application to backgrounds or type.





Background color used throughout



Playlist mixes with subtle color application


Explorations around stacked detail shots, diptychs with borders and floating typography

Across all directions, layouts were designed as modules rather than fixed templates:

  • Titles could float, anchor, or disappear entirely
  • Editorial content could breathe full-screen or be framed by space
  • Product stories could shift between stills, GIFs, and mixed-media sequences

This flexibility ensures longevity, allowing the brand to adapt content without redesigning the system.

RESULTS AND REFLECTIONS

The final result establishes Instagram Stories as a quiet but confident extension of The Row’s world, a space where typography, pacing, and restraint do the work usually assigned to spectacle. 

By resisting platform conventions and embracing discipline, the system turns Stories into a moment of pause.

Working with The Row was deeply rewarding, mostly because of the brand’s exceptionally strong design sensibility and quiet, highly specific tone of voice. 

Every decision, typographic, spatial, or editorial, required precision and restraint, leaving little room for excess but a great deal of responsibility in the details.

The process reinforced the value of subtlety as a design approach, where decisions are felt through careful editing, spacing, and tone rather than obvious visual statements.