Product Pivot:
Influencer Partnerships to Brand Partnerships
In the fall of 2019, we pivoted the product and began development of another concept for Shopify merchants: brand to brand partnerships. We used our exclusive access to the Shopify platform as a “sales channel” (enabled us to communicate data about a merchants products into and out of our own system), to facilitate two Shopify merchants to supply and sell (retail) each other’s products… totally digitally… unlike traditional wholesale arrangements. Below, an early version of the onboard flow utilizes both the Material UI system as well as the visual illustration system.
Starting with only the basic concept of connecting two merchants to supply and sell each other’s products, I worked with our Founder and Product Manager to outline goals, objectives, user flows, and designed every screen accordingly. At times, we included additional designers as contractors to provide critique, new perspectives, and to contribute additional design work. From day one at Carro, I managed at least two contractors to provide additional UX/UI work and some of the visual design work needed for sales & marketing.
Having established a design system, we were able to create an entirely new product quickly, and with integrity to the existing product features.
New User Setup
With the bare minimum of requirements identified to utilize the app, we built a set up flow that utilized all the same page types and components already in use for the Influencer Partnerships product. This established some familiarity for our users who’d already set up that product, and enabled our dev team to create the flow a bit more quickly.
Set up was primarily geared around preparing each party to do business with each other. We needed to know who was using the product and would become the point of contact for the partnership, how the selling or Retail partner would pay the Supplier partner for goods that’d be eventually sold, and how the Supplier would receive the payment, etc. Later we added additional steps, such as shipping preferences.
With an understanding of the product vision, we started with our customers. Who are we serving & how might this differ with the new product?
Customer Personas were researched, discussed and defined. With the pivot, we found that the larger the business, the more our target customers diverged.
The Core Experience
Having completed set up and prepared for business, the core experience oriented around what we initially called the “Directory,” which was something like a visual catalog of brands, separated into categories (verticals), which a brand interested in adding products to their store could browse in their search for products and partners.
The Directory
Having completed set up and prepared for business, the core experience oriented around what we initially called the “Directory,” which was something like a visual catalog of brands, separated into categories (verticals), which a brand interested in adding products to their store could browse in their search for products and partners.
Brand Pages
The brand detail page page both gives the user more information about the brand and displays all products that brand has made available to be sold through a partnership. Designing this page presented a few interesting challenges:
How can a page be designed that presents any brand in a compelling way? And, how might we display any type of product with any form of imagery in any aspect ratio in a consistent way?
The restrained “MVP” approach to the development of this page eliminated some potential and future complexity, such as displaying editorial imagery, but our primary answer to the above came in the form of my approach to product cards.
More coming soon…