Our community has long expressed the wish for a dedicated Wildling Shoes App. Now it’s here, and using it is as intuitive as we had hoped. Here’s how we got here and what’s coming up.
Josephine is an avid collector of Christmas market mulled wine cups who lives in Berlin and appreciates structure. She’s also the Product Owner of the Wildling Shoes App. She took on this role in the summer of 2022 after a great deal of conceptual preparation and planning had gone into launching the app. Now Jo has gotten the whole thing across the finish line, so she knows exactly what it takes to get an app like this up and running and what has to happen next. This keeps her in constant contact with all the different participants, such as the agency that looks after the technical side or also internal interfaces. We spoke with Jo and posed perhaps the most important question right off the bat:
Why did we create the app?
Jo replies, “From the very start, it was important for us that the app isn’t just a copy of the webshop. We wanted to create the app as an independent channel for mobile users to interact with Wildling Shoes more easily.” That wouldn’t be technically possible for the webshop without a complete makeover of the site. Jo explains why: “Think of the webshop like a finished house. Major changes, like converting a wooden cottage into a brick rancher, can’t be done without tearing down the cottage first. With the app, we were able to start fresh from the foundation up.”
Stumbling blocks and valuable feedback
We’re not going to pretend that making something like this happen doesn’t come with the occasional stumbling block. And they’re not always what you would expect, like having three collections in the English version show up simply as “Empty”. Or items not being removed from the shopping cart after a purchase. Some of these hurdles have turned out to be kind of amusing, while others have caused serious stress. Add to this the simple fact that the Wildling Shoes App is new for everyone at Wildling Shoes, so the in-house exchange of information still has to be tweaked, while in contrast the information channels for the Wildling Shoes website have routinely been running very smoothly for a long time now. This means a brand new process has to be integrated into internal procedures that are already established.
On the other hand, every bit of feedback we get on the app, both internal and external, is important. “That’s why it’s great if as many users as possible download the app and use it for their purchases,” says Jo.
“Feedback we receive about the app helps us enormously. That’s why we read every single comment so that we can build the whole thing on a really solid basis.”
This also involves resolving smaller problems like bugs that pop up sometimes during log-in or reducing the frequency of crashes.
In the first month after the app launch alone, the application was already downloaded over 22.000 times, so let’s give you, our community, a big round of applause! After all, it was you who asked for the app itself in the first place, along with specific functions like “Favorites”. This was especially important for all of us from the get-go, and as far as we can see the response has been great. That makes us happy (and drives us to take the app to the next level for you)!
Cover image: Johanna Balzer | Wildling Shoes
