Plus Closet
Creating an inclusive fashion resale community where plus-sized women can discover, share, and celebrate style without size limitations.
Role
– UX/UI Designer
– UX Researcher
– UX Researcher
Timeline
– 06/2025 – 07/2025
Tools
– Figma/FigJam
– Zoom
– Zoom
Background
The fashion scene is one of trends and a wide of variety of tastes. Personally, I am a fan of streetwear, but this is not about me. Within this scene, there is one group of people that have been heavily marginalized: plus-sized women. It’s very difficult to find clothing for this particular group since fashion is focused on “slim” figures. Enter Plus Closet, a resale platform catered to plus-sized in order make their shopping experience more enjoyable, easier, and build a community. My partners and I were tasked to build out an MVP application for our client within 4 weeks to get the company up and rolling with its initial steps.
The Problem
It is a challenging process to find plus-size women’s clothing.
The main problems that our target users are facing come from limited and inconsistent availability for trendy, fashionable, and well-fitting clothes. No one should feel like they are being excluded from popular trends and yet, plus-sized shoppers face a poor user experience both in-store and online. Because of this, these shoppers have very emotionally taxing experiences in which they cannot find what they are looking for whether it’s about style or size. There is an urgent need for a platform that will not only foster a community surrounding these users, but to also celebrate them.
The Solution
Create an MVP mobile app that will make shopping more accessible for plus-sized women
My team and I designed an MVP mobile app that will allow plus-sized women shoppers to easily access clothing by personalizing their shopping experience with filters, sellers to build and foster a community, and bring plus-sized women into the fashion spotlight.
Let’s Hit the Runway!
Understanding Our Users
As someone who loves streetwear fashion and matching colors for clothes, I thought that the main problem for our users stemmed from a lack of availability in terms of popular clothing. That kind of thinking won’t help our users very much and the team and I conducted primary and secondary research to help lead our design thinking. These were the key insights that we found during our research.
So Who's the Competition?
Resale platforms don’t take plus-size into a lot of consideration
The team and the client wanted the platform to stand out from the competition by bringing more attention to the plus-sized community. To do this, we conducted a competitor analysis to see how we could foster such a community while also bringing more confidence to these users. From our research, we found that even resale companies don’t bring attention to plus-sized clothing and often brush it away in poor filters/categories.
How Might We?
Now that we have our research complete, we had our main questions to answer as we started our design process:
Seller Experience
Seller Experience
- 1) How might we make it easier and more rewarding for plus-size women to sell their clothing online?
- 2) How might we help plus-size sellers feel confident and empowered throughout the resale process?
- 3) How might we streamline the reselling experience for plus-size fashion while honoring the complexity of fit?
- 4) How might we foster a community between buyers and sellers to promote communication and empowerment?
- 1) How might we create a resale platform where plus-size women feel prioritized, not sidelined?
- 2) How might we make it easier for plus-size buyers to find stylish pieces that fit them?
- 1) How might we build a plus-size resale community that celebrates style, supports sellers, and earns buyer trust?
Meet Our Users!
Key Functions
After meeting with the client and presenting our findings, we have discussed on which functions would be the most vital to build out within these 4 weeks:
- 1) Create a seller dashboard that provides seller analytics, product uploading, order tracking, and community-building functions.
- 2) Personalize the process to make searching for clothes easier via recommendations and curate trendy clothes.
- 3) Create an inclusive environment through filters and messaging to improve the overall user experience.
Let's Get Designing!
With our planning complete and a clear idea of what needed to be built out, we started work on our user flows in order to get a good idea of the structural layout of the application. These are the main user flows we have put together:
Drafting Early Designs
Now that we have a general idea of how the application should be laid out, the team got to work on creating low fidelity prototypes for the client. Initially, the client wanted a website and thus we built our wireframes for laptops.
Buyer Onboarding
Seller Onboarding
Shopping/Home Pages
Seller Dashboard
Visual Design
Create a brand that brings a sense of luxury and comfort to shoppers
Now we can’t just hand over a design with a bland structure like this. We want to build a community that brings a sense of both luxury and comfort to the users. To give the application that comforting feel, we decided on warm colors like coral and light pink while implementing a creamy white color to offset others. To bring in that luxurious sense, we made use of the Marcellus SC font for the headers and Manrope font for the body text.
Is the Design Working?
In order to get critical feedback on these designs, I went out and conducted 3 user tests, which involved the following tasks:
- 1) Complete the onboarding
- 2) Navigate to the seller dashboard
- a) Upload a new listing for a dress
- b) Edit a listing
- c) View current orders
- 3) Search for and buy a dress from the home page
Iterated Prototypes
A slight hiccup
Before we presented our findings to our client, they told us that they would want a mobile app over a website first. Moving forward from the high fidelity prototyping phase, we redesigned to make a mobile application. With that cleared up, these were the following changes we made for our high-fidelity prototypes:
Specific Instructions
2/3 users wanted assistance with what should be written in the specific text boxes (description, price, tags, etc.) when uploading an item.
2/3 users wanted assistance with what should be written in the specific text boxes (description, price, tags, etc.) when uploading an item.
Filters
Based on the client’s priorities, we re-ordered the filters to match them.
Based on the client’s priorities, we re-ordered the filters to match them.
Final High Fidelity Prototypes
Onboarding
Seller Dashboard
Shopping Experience
Final MVP Design
Now, the moment you have all been waiting for. Please welcome on to the stage Plus Closet: your go-to platform for plus-sized women’s clothing. Plus Closet is more than just an app, however; it’s a movement celebrating plus-sized women everywhere and bringing them into the fashion spotlight.
What Did I Learn?
This was a very interesting project for me overall. I learned a lot more about the marginalization of plus-sized women within the fashion industry and the subtle tactics that are used to push that fashion style under the rug. The secondary research that the team and I conducted opened a lot to me and showed me many possible solutions we could try to build out during the project.
As for the project itself, this was the first time I worked with a client in a team. I learned the true value of being able to balance ideas with others who had around the same amount of experience of me. It was truly refreshing to be able to get live feedback from my teammates and doing the same for them.
Working with the client also provided me with tough challenges. While other projects provided an ideal situation, clients can sometimes shift their wants which happened during the shift from the low fidelity phase to the high fidelity phase. From this experience, I learned that it’s wise to be quick on my feet and adapt to changes when they are needed.
As for the project itself, this was the first time I worked with a client in a team. I learned the true value of being able to balance ideas with others who had around the same amount of experience of me. It was truly refreshing to be able to get live feedback from my teammates and doing the same for them.
Working with the client also provided me with tough challenges. While other projects provided an ideal situation, clients can sometimes shift their wants which happened during the shift from the low fidelity phase to the high fidelity phase. From this experience, I learned that it’s wise to be quick on my feet and adapt to changes when they are needed.
What's Next?
Working with the client was an absolute pleasure overall as they were very open to new ideas that we provided and brought in new insights for us to use when developing the MVP application. If I were to continue working with them in the future, these would be the new functions I would like to implement:
- 1) Implementing an AI that provides help and suggestions when uploading a new item.
- 2) Add some clarity on the condition tags as they can be confusing.
- 3) Ensure size/measurement information is central amongst all brands and clothing pieces.
- 4) Add an FAQ section for packaging, uploads, and the buyer experience.
- 5) Implement wishlist functions for shoppers.