Launched in late November 2012, this holiday Guide to Giving was developed in a matter of weeks to re-skin the VENDA-based VINCE.COM e-commerce site for a holiday feature promotion.
Blocked by a less-than-collaborative in-house technical department (a la: "You can't do anything with the site. Template redesign is out of the question.") we simply scraped the public html files right down to high-resolution product imagery, availability, and related items and prototyped a completely new front-end skin for the holiday promotion.
After essentially redesigning the site through simple appropriation of existing public content and a new algorithm for cropping photos and user interface for full-screen browsing (as well as re-inventing an information architecture deep-linked with the existing venda backend that better suited holiday themes and shopping) we were granted API access to the venda backend, including suggestions for more frequent availability queries to avoid what seemed like obvious future issues approaching the holiday season.
The branding for the holiday feature was also adopted for brick & mortar shop displays and on-going digital communications.