How we won the 2023 Visuelt Award for HELZT

What we did to win Gold - E-commerce

Today's fitness market is overflowing with clichés. Everything from protein powder to quick glasses to tight tights. The environment pushes more people to be equal, where there is only one right way to do it, which makes it harder to stand out from the crowd. HELZT represents those who want to break away from this, show that there are other ways to do it. Breaking free — breaking away from distractions, breaking away from cliches, breaking away from the must-haves — became an important link in the path from brand to online store. The approach was to look at designing everything from new identity, packaging, online store and idiom from a new angle.

Behind the scenes at HELZT's award-winning online store

Identity is the meeting point between the physical and the digital, between the boundaries of the body and digital building blocks—exemplified by the pulse beats in the logo. The message is that it's only you versus yourself, on the road to pushing your own limits, and with fewer distractions along the way the easier you reach your goals. The identity and the online store are therefore stripped down to only the very simplest, down to a raw and rough, but also honed and serious expression to reflect the athlete and the intensity of the sessions. Only the most necessary are taken care of — even colors do not act as a distraction — with a balanced expression of air and concrete phrases that become like a push in the back like a PT in the ear.

Athlete in focus

It is here that the use of images, in the void between surface and text, that the message becomes visible. However expressive and aesthetic, they are largely kept sober, and concentrated on the product or brand's attribute and function. The holistic expression of the online store exudes that it does not seek to reach everyone, but rather reflects that the brand itself comes from the target audience. It was important to find a photographer who could reflect this approach and values, something we felt Markus Gjendaar was able to manage. At the same time, it was important that the image style highlighted the performers and the garments, without falling into the cliché where the subjects felt sexualised or objectifying.

A technical tour de force

When it came to transferring the design to the online store it was our developers' task to develop it. The choice fell on spending Webflow, considering its flexible solutions and ease of use. This was combined with Shopify's front-end API for a more seamless and unified ecommerce.

One challenge in development was the need to separate sales from different countries. The solution was to implement two separate Shopify stores, each with its own inventory and prices. This made sure to keep the user experience consistent with everything gathered in one place, rather than having to resort to other and more obscure solutions.

Jury comment:

Within training, there are some clichés, but Helzt has managed to stay away from them. It is an online store that exudes that it does not seek to reach everyone, and instead reflects that the sender himself is part of the target group. The executed image style manages to highlight the performers and the garments without, for a moment, being perceived as sexualized or objectifying. The expression is at the same time raw but also honed, just like the performers themselves.

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