Abercrombie & Fitch is one of the world’s largest clothing retailer and a brand with a very strong identity. Their Human Resources team recruits talent from around the world that range from part-time in store workers and progresses to high-level professionals to work in the corporate offices.
Abercrombie & Fitch’s issues were two-fold. The first one was their prior recruiting site was a small slice of the giant Abercrombie site, making it difficult to find and even more difficult to update and control. The second issue was the client needed an improved way to showcase the breadth of recruitment activities and employment opportunities that the company provided. In addition, to these two issues, Abercrombie needed every element to stay “on brand”, which is a crucial component of their business. The technical components of the A&F brand identity- very specific grey tones, hi-def reproduction of an extensive video warehouse and a precise library of fonts- were elements that would need accurate reproduction on whatever platform a user would engage with the site.
Working with our partners at Conrad Philips Vutech, Switchbox was able to develop a highly-visual, highly-stylized solution that stayed brand-perfect throughout the site. We created a separate URL (www.anfcareers.com) that would house the site and tie back as needed to the parent site. We created a Custom Content Management System (CMS) to handle the various update needs, and even took it a step further for ease of use: the CMS actually recreates the live web-page that’s being edited so the user can see exactly how their changes will affect the live version of the site. It’s highly intuitive and highly visual, making it easy for A&F to use the interface and to train new employees on its use. (Oh – and it’s also branded with the A&F look!).
Additionally, we took CPV’s beautiful design for the site and engineered it into a responsive presentation. Responsive is a technical tool that allows the site to interpret the type of device that a user is accessing the site with (desktop, iPad, Kindle, tablet, iPhone, Galaxy or other smartphone/mobile device); knowing that, the site then returns the proper visual style and scaling, allowing users to see the site as “virtually perfect” regardless of the device used. We also opted for an integration of Vimeo Pro to power the video portions of the site, customizing the interfaces to align with the A&F brand.
The site was deployed in the fall of 2012, immediately prior to A&F’s busiest season of recruiting visits to college campuses around the world. Since then, the A&F staff has done a number of updates to the site via the CMS, keeping the company’s graphics updated for seasonality. Traffic rates through the server had an initial swell over the first 6 weeks as users discovered the tools available there, and have since leveled off into a consistent usage pattern (consistent week-to-week usage; spikes in regionalized traffic as recruiters visit college campuses in specific areas of the US, Europe and Asia).
