MoVapes Brooklyn was founded in late 2013, during a time in which “vaping” was still emerging on the East Coast. But by 2014 it had become a quickly growing industry, bringing with it a wave of new retailers eager to cash in on the new market. Naturally, MoVapes wanting to retain the economically viable fan- and customer-base they had gained from inception, and so they reached out to us to help them with a two-fold project. One, Movapes needed a rebrand and re-face for their existing online store, which was hosted in Volusion and used a very basic, standard template. Two, they wished to create a new, custom website on a WordPress CMS to use as their main website and thereby expand their overall online brand presence.
In order to differentiate the Movapes from a rapidly growing pool of competitors, we focused our concept for a new brand image on the company’s founder, who started the company out of a love for the hobby of vaping. There are two consumer markets in the vape industry – those who vape simply as a replacement for cigarette consumption, and those who vape because they truly enjoy the process and mechanics behind the act of vaping itself. Movapes was conceived from the latter group, and similarly caters to the latter group, hosting regular evening get-togethers where fellow vape hobbyists can gather with like-minded individuals to share stories and knowledge, to build and innovate new mechanisms, and – most of all – to vape.
Thus, we formulated the design and user flow for the new Movapes website to reflect and appeal to the vape enthusiast, telling the story of a culture that epitomizes modernism in the technology it grew from – and yet, a culture that is ever traditional in its use of that technology as a medium for the greater act of human bonding. In this vein, to convey the idea of vaping as a choice rather than a habit, we reimagined the Movapes brand as providers of a curated collection of high-end lifestyle products, applying clean geometric lines and white space juxtaposed with soft, vintage-style imagery to evoke the environment of approachable luxury. “No judgments, no attitudes. Just the love of vape.”