Work/Alpargatas

Hands holding a tablet running the new B2B ordering platform inside a Havaianas store, flip-flops behind

Reimagining the B2B sales platform behind Havaianas

A hybrid tablet and desktop B2B sales platform for the maker of Havaianas, letting field reps take live, stock-aware orders instead of working from PDF catalogues.

Client
Alpargatas via Outra Coisa
Completed
2021
Role
Senior UX Designer
Product Design

Alpargatas, the global footwear group behind Havaianas, Osklen and Dupé, sells into more than 85 countries through a B2B platform that had been stitched together over fifteen years from separate, ageing systems. On the ground the gap showed plainly: field representatives carried iPads, but the actual selling still ran off a PDF catalogue. Reps took orders by hand or over email and re-keyed them into a desktop system later, a process that was slow, error-prone and blind to what was really in stock.

A Havaianas flagship storefront, the retail end of the wholesale orders reps were taking by hand
Havaianas flip-flops on beachwear, the fixed-assortment product the platform had to order by the pair

The engagement was deliberately tight, two weeks, so we spent the time where it counted. Shadowing a sales user inside their own workflow surfaced the pain points fast, the sharpest being that reps had no live view of stock and so wrote orders that often had to be unpicked and corrected afterwards. From there we prototyped a modular hybrid platform built around how the job is really done rather than how the old system assumed it was.

The legacy ordering system on a boxy old CRT monitor, the dated desktop tool reps re-keyed orders into

Before

The redesigned platform on a phone held in-store, putting a live sales dashboard and stock in the rep's hand

After

The proposal put live stock data directly on the product and order pages, so a rep could adapt an order while still sitting with the customer. A predictive box-mix recommender optimised orders down to the pair without disrupting the industrial processes behind them, since the products ship in fixed assortments rather than loose units. Quick on-the-go note-taking and cloud drafts let a rep start an order on a tablet in the field and finish it on desktop, where a sales dashboard surfaced KPIs and order management for the wider team.

Four tablet screens of the proposed platform: product browsing, live stock, order building and a dashboard

A dozen screens set the look, feel and architecture of the future platform: a clear, evidenced vision the client’s in-house team could build towards, which is all a two-week engagement should promise.