CHRYSALIS

A marketplace for make-believe

Chrysalis set out to build an online marketplace where people could buy and sell costumes, or send theirs in for Chrysalis to sell on their behalf. The model turned a throwaway habit into a more sustainable one, opening up a wider world of costumes, new and used.

Chrysalis arrived with a bold, genuinely novel idea and no brand, no platform, and no way to bring it to market. The assignment: take a completely novel concept and make it a reality, giving it the brand, web and mobile platforms, marketing collateral, and strategic guidance to flip an industry on its head.

Built from scratch, down to the envelope

Ruckus delivered a full brand identity in 45 days: a wordmark, a butterfly mark, and a complete suite of business essentials, from cards to letterhead to envelopes. One coherent system, ready for a company taking its first steps into the market, carried by a palette with a pulse, aquamarine, sunglow, paradise, and indigo, set in Proxima Nova, bold for headlines and regular for everything else.

Two platforms for two sides of a marketplace

The web storefront is a responsive e-commerce experience with a guided upload flow, credit-based checkout, and a catalog built for browsing by theme, holiday, and event. The homepage explains the model in three simple steps: sell an old costume using the upload guide, earn credits when you make a sale, and get a new costume for as low as five dollars.

A native mobile companion was designed so sellers could create and manage listings on the go, snap costume photos, set pricing, and log in with a tap. The same brand and voice, sized for a phone. Selling an old costume took a few taps.

Turn that pile of cloth into cash

To bring the concept to a crowd, Ruckus built a Kickstarter campaign fronted by original characters, with onboarding that explained a brand-new idea in a few playful screens: upload your old costumes, and swap them for something new. The campaign put a name, a face, and a pitch on a behavior that had never existed before.

A complete company, brought to life

Despite the hidden complexity of Chrysalis' business model, Ruckus delivered work of the utmost quality in a compressed timeframe, giving a genuinely novel idea every tool it needed to meet the market. In six months, Chrysalis went from a blank page to a launched two-sided marketplace: brand identity, business essentials, a web platform, a mobile app, and a Kickstarter campaign.