Responses by Staffan Ulmert, chief executive officer, Valdemar Web Agency.

Background: Fooound scrapes subculture fashion from the underbelly of the internet to find bizarre, indie and alternative brands and list them on the site. With our partner, we can offer these often Chinese or Korean brands to the rest of the world, using an agent who communicates, quality checks and ships it to our customers around the world. Fooound makes the process risk free without communication mishaps.

Design core: Together with our design and illustration agent Studio Fridh, we wanted to aim towards our core audience of Gen Z men. We had a lot of freedom as the brands we carry are edgy, up-and-coming and often unique. We wanted to limit ourselves to two fonts for the site overall, and went for different ’90s-like fonts. While the headers are made from a classic ’90s font, our copy—and the rest of the site—uses a pixelated, all-capital-letter font that we believe is easy to read and can be used in just about everything. The old school feel of the fonts; our unusual, out-there logo; and the clothing brands made for something fashionably odd.

E-commerce fashion sites have a tendency to all use the same product page format, but we tried to make use of alternative drop-down menus and links. Finally, we went for the classic blue link color and an aggressive lime green for spacing and blocks—two things which shouldn't work but make the site stand out. And since our clothing brands are aggressive, in-your-face, jolie-laide styled, we knew we could do ugly and make it work. Our audience would gladly accept something ugly rather than ultrastylistic.

Challenges: We have 300 different brands, all with their own visual identity. Having all those different variations match with our one site was terribly difficult at times.

Time constraints: As always, I think there were technical solutions which we would have liked to have spent more time on. Sometimes, the tech required more time and effort for the smallest of visual improvements, which would have improved the site.

Alternate paths: I think we spent too little time on the UX side of things when designing. When the tech caught up, we were out of time to improve even more.

Navigational structure: We knew we had to commit to having the usual e-commerce product page designs. If not, we would just confuse our customers who are familiar with one type of shopping experience. So, structure-wise, we kept it close to whatever standard there is and let the rest of the design do the fun job.

Technology: For the back end, we brought in Mohamed Elghobaty, whose engineering skills put all of the scraping functionality together. The back end is the site’s core, an invisible force, retrieving products and adding them to the site. It sounds simple, but with different Chinese marketplaces, Elghobaty’s back-end engineering has to adapt to a lot of different settings. The front end runs on JReviews, a directory system capable of enabling reviews, conversations and community—an all around perfect solution to a complex project.