VeVe Comics - in partnership with Marvel

VeVe is the largest mobile-first digital collectibles platform, partnering with some of the world’s biggest brands including Disney, DC, Marvel, Sesame Street, Coca Cola and Lamborghini, to name a few.

The company faced two key challenges that I was hired to help with.

The first challenge was to transform their existing collectibles web store to adopt e-commerce best practices. For example, at the time I joined, the VeVe Collectibles web store was entirely behind a login wall - meaning that the product catalog was not visible to search engines at all.

The second challenge was to expand their comics offerings with a new dedicated comics web store in a way that was accessible and desirable for not just existing users who prefer to collect and trade digital collectible comics, but also a new set of prospective customers who simply love reading comics. As a lifelong comic book fan, this was a particularly exciting project.

From day one, we partnered with the most well-known brand in comics - Marvel. Through user research, I explored comic readers' behaviors, priorities, and pain points. I then worked with key stakeholders from VeVe and Marvel, incorporating business priorities and constraints to iteratively develop low-fidelity designs for a new comics web store and a comic reader app for mobile devices. These designs were validated with the key user groups. I then developed high-fidelity versions of these designs in Figma to give an outcome that balanced desirability, viability, and feasibility.

Next, I brought my skills and experience as a senior frontend developer to this project. This involved helping a small team choose the architecture for the new VeVe Comics web store (server-side rendered with NextJS/ReactJS); advocating for the use of TailwindCSS which was new to the company at the time; developing a component library based on shadcn/radix and TailwindCSS with atomic design principles; integrating SEO best practices throughout; and, promoting a high standard of software engineering practices. I also orchestrated alpha and beta testing.

We successfully launched VeVe Comics on schedule to a positive reception at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on 14th March 2024.

Check it out: VeVe Comics web store; VeVe Comics Reader app (for iOS and iPadOS on Apple App Store, for Android on Google Play Store)

In the news: Marvel; Morningstar; and, Popverse.