Responses by Yuji Sakuma, creative director, Use All Five

Background: The site is a showcase for the entire range of Mr. Leight eyewear and sunglasses—a collaboration between father and son, Larry and Garrett Leight. The site also functions as an important tool in introducing the brand to the fashion-conscious consumer. While not an e-commerce experience, the site gives potential customers a wide range of ways to find the perfect pair of eye or sunglasses.

Highlights: The changing full-bleed background images on the category level pages as well as the boutiques landing page. They were a fun solution to the problem of visually differentiating between sub-categories within a grid system.

Challenges: Creating a clear way to communicate the different sub-categories within Sun, Optical and Clips. There was a need for some product education, so we created a filtering system that would allow for additional text to accompany the filtered grids, giving the consumer a better understanding of how Mr. Leight’s collections are organized.

Favorite details: How muted and pared back the typography is across the site. The products themselves are very beautiful and we had amazing assets to work with, so we wanted them to be the stars of the show.

Navigational structure: As a high-end fashion-forward brand, the thinking was that gender-based categorization was less important for the Mr. Leight customer and that the bigger determining factor would be personal style and taste. We decided to move away from a Mens/Womens approach for the main navigation, and instead focused on allowing the customer to dive straight into Eye, Sun or Clips.

Anything new: The boutique’s page was an interesting lesson in how the optical world differentiates between stockists. We created several versions of the page before realizing that there was a need to differentiate between more fashion-centric “boutiques” and more practical “opticians.” By elevating the boutiques with more visual real estate, we were able to condense the opticians into a search function, which made it easier for users to quickly find the nearest locations.