LuxeTrove

Luxe Trove is an online two-sided marketplace for authenticated, pre-loved luxury fashion in Africa. Sellers such as boutique owners, influencers, and individuals reach a wider audience. Buyers own designer pieces at a fraction of the original price. By extending the life of luxury goods, the product supports SDG 12, Responsible Consumption and Production.

The project started as a broad brief for a general secondhand marketplace. Structured discovery narrowed it to a focused, viable niche for an MVP.

The Problem

Luxury fashion is out of reach for most people in Africa because of its cost. That demand fuels a large market of low-quality counterfeits that wear out fast and add to waste. Owners of genuine pieces, meanwhile, lack a trusted way to resell them. Luxe Trove responds with accessibility, affordability and authenticity.

The Solution

The team used an Agile, Scrum-based approach: short iterations with incremental releases, so each sprint produced something stakeholders could review.

1. Discovery. Direct conversations with prospective buyers and sellers, a questionnaire survey, online market reports, and competitive analysis.

2. Evidence-based narrowing. Sellers most often wanted to resell luxury fashion, and buyers most wanted to buy it. We presented this in a sprint review, and stakeholders approved the focus.

3. Brand and requirements. The branding group defined the mission, vision, values and brand identity, while requirements and user journeys were gathered in parallel.

4. Design and build. Designers moved from user journeys to wireframes to a Figma prototype. Developers built against it in weekly sprints.

5. Pitch. A startup pitch and a live MVP demo for sponsors.

• Schedule pressure. The team ran a little over two weeks past the planned timeline, partly because of scope creep. I re-ranked the backlog against the original product goal using MoSCoW, committed only to must-haves and deferred nice-to-haves.

• Late design changes. Feedback on the user flow arrived after the interface was finalised, and views differed on reopening it. After facilitated discussions, with time short, the changes were implemented during development so delivery stayed on track.

• Distributed collaboration. Contributors worked across countries and time zones, some travelling, with occasional connectivity problems. Polling the team for shared meeting windows kept everyone included.

Delivered a working MVP and presented a live demo on startup pitch day. The final scope was the must-have requirements only; nice-to-haves were left out because of the deadline.

• Sponsors responded positively to the product and the pitch

• Ran approximately 13 weekly sprints between April and July 2024

• Despite scope creep, kept the overrun to a little over two weeks by proactively removing blockers and managing cross-team dependencies through a RAID log

• Maintained roadmap alignment by partnering with the product owners on MoSCoW backlog prioritization, based on business objectives, user needs, urgency and risk, and refined user stories

• Running sprints from discovery gives stakeholders evidence to decide with, not guesses.

• Strict prioritization is the most useful Scrum tool under a fixed deadline.

• Agree a design sign-off and change-request point early to avoid late rework.

• Distributed teams need scheduling and communication agreements from the start.