What were you most excited to work on concerning the new Na Nin website?

There’s something really surreal and special about collaborating with a brand you’ve admired for so long. Na Nin has been a staple in the Richmond community for a decade, so having the opportunity to work together in such a close capacity feels like the ultimate realization of our goal to reinvest services into the local businesses we (and Richmond) adore.

What were some of the biggest challenges?

There are a lot of technical pieces that need to work in perfect synchronicity to build an e-commerce site that’s both easy for an administrator to update and easy for a shopper to navigate — especially for a business like Na Nin that’s managing multiple product categories like sizes, styles, fabrics, and colors. We were committed to understanding Na Nin’s specific pain points, taking care to learn how shoppers engage with the site so we could restructure product management while designing a more intuitive online shopping experience.

What will be the most helpful/most used new update?

It’s not a coincidence that a project's biggest challenges often lead to the most satisfying improvements—having a highly organized product categorization system means that browsing becomes more intentional and less overwhelming. Being able to filter by things like size, color, and fabric are intuitive features we take for granted as shoppers, but it’s those small additions that take the burden off users and vastly improve the online shopping experience.

Who would be a dream client for Night swim to work with?

Besides Na Nin? Now that we can check this project off our dream list, we’re itching to work with more locally-owned and -operated small-to-medium sized businesses. We love our clients no matter where they live, but having the ability to build in-person relationships with businesses that directly impact our Richmond community is especially fulfilling.

What inspired the name Night Swim?

Both Farrah and I are lucky to have a LOT of memories of night swims with family and friends, and there’s a reason those memories are especially poignant—they’re these little glimmers that feel both risky and joyful. So much of the work we do can be traced back to the feeling of jumping underwater in that strange but magical time after sunset and before sunrise—harnessing a sense of adventure, diving deep below the surface, making waves, finding a sense of clarity, etc.

We absolutely loved working with you! What were some of the highlights working with Na Nin?

SO many! We love working with women-owned businesses; it’s extremely powerful to be in a room of women who work so tirelessly yet so gracefully. There are some clients that just get it, and Na Nin is one of them. Storytelling was already fundamental to the way Na Nin thought of their branding, which brought so much energy and alignment to the brand strategy portion of our work (or, as Na Nin accurately coined it, “brand therapy”).

We even ran the name “Night Swim” by the Na Nin team before moving forward, and their immediate support and encouragement gave us the confidence to finalize our own branding process. It’s an honor to work with people so willing to cheer others on and uplift those around them. Long live Night Swim x Na Nin!