Faire: Beyond the Page
While digital marketplaces offer unparalleled scale, traditional retail buyers frequently prefer the tactile nature of print catalogs during seasonal inventory discovery. Rather than forcing retailers to completely abandon their established offline purchasing habits, our team used an internal hackathon to design a physical-to-digital bridge. We concepted, designed, and printed a sixty-page physical catalog integrated with a companion iOS augmented reality experience. As the UX and AR development lead, I mapped out the interaction models and programmed the image-recognition loops. The project took first place at the company hackathon and secured an immediate green light from executives to explore spatial commerce.
Role: UX Lead, AR Developer (Unity Architecture)
Duration: 2 Weeks (High-Intensity Sprint)
Output: Printed 60-page catalog and functional iOS image-recognition prototype
Context: Aligning with Legacy Mental Models
Our marketplace research indicated that a significant segment of boutique retailers still relied heavily on offline sales workflows, specifically trade shows, physical sales representatives, and printed lookbooks. Faire's purely digital platform required these traditional buyers to radically alter how they source inventory. We recognized an opportunity to accelerate platform adoption by meeting these users where they were at. By combining physical media with mobile spatial computing, we could lower the barrier to entry for analog-first retailers.
The Strategy: Designing the Connective Tissue
We designed a high-end print lookbook titled The Catalog: Volume 01 - The Minimalist Issue. The design language was optimized to support a dual-modal user journey. A retailer could flip through the physical pages naturally to evaluate product styling. When they discovered an item of interest, they could look through their mobile camera to activate a contextual digital layer.
The application used image recognition to identify the exact product spread on the paper. It then dynamically projected real-time inventory metrics directly over the physical page layout. Tapping the augmented interface instantly pulled up the live product detail page on Faire.com, allowing the user to configure variations and add items to their wholesale cart before returning to the printed book.
To secure resources for a live production roadmap, we knew static wireframes and conceptual descriptions would not suffice. Stakeholders needed to experience the physical-to-digital handoff firsthand to appreciate the fluidity of the interaction model.
I built the functional engine in Unity to handle real-time computer vision tracking. I programmed the system to recognize specific graphical markers within our custom page layouts, ensuring stable tracking under varying real-world lighting conditions. Once the spatial anchoring was stable, I mapped relational product metadata to each target image. Tapping the floating interface triggers sent the user directly to the responsive web application checkout flow. This high-fidelity proof of concept successfully demonstrated the system's viability, generating immediate organizational buy-in.
The AR Prototype: Programming for Executive Buy-In
Final Designs
The final exhibition combined physical print production with live device testing, proving that analog and digital paradigms can strengthen each other. By framing emerging spatial patterns around deeply ingrained user habits, we demonstrated how innovative interfaces can expand platform market share into traditional business sectors. In short, we won!