As we wrap up our editing of Store Design and move into the consultancy’s busy season, it’s time to talk more publicly about what we’re doing in the current moment.

Obviously, much has happened since I last spoke about store design. Google concluded their engagement with quantitative design & experimentation; other tools have launched to fill the gap. Technique is nice to discuss, of course – but beyond that, and far more important, is adopting the correct mindset to become receptive to the essential practice of store design.

If you have a podcast or a blog where you think our work would be a useful perspective for your audience, please hit reply and let’s begin a conversation.

I recently spent a few weeks holding structural space for a client whose team members have been incorrectly seized by the ego-driven toxic masculinity that is all too common in the direct-to-consumer ecommerce space. It was fun pushing back on literally everything, saying “no” seven times a day, hauling people on calls and telling them are fundamentally, cosmically wrong in front of all of the people who are responsible for paying them. I love having fun. Don’t we all?

I’m reminded of that one time in 2009 when someone got the company to print business cards for me with the job title “Fun Ruiner” as a joke, only it wasn’t a joke then and it’s not a joke now. The client hired me for this. The CEO supports the practice, which is sacred. Two objectively incorrect people got fired two weeks after my arrival. Now we are all here, witnessing.

At Draft, we sell design research, you buy A/B tests, and the fundamental outcome is deep structural cultural change. This is evident in our case studies, which speak more broadly to cultural change than numbers in specific. We are good at shifting psyches, at redefining what “focus” should be.

Meanwhile, I finished writing the end of Store Design last week, and in it I spoke of the deep psychospiritual impoverishment afflicting ecommerce, and how it will bring about the long-in-coming conclusion of independent business, as we are all eaten by a company who actually knows how to research and focus on customer needs, unlike most store owners.

As Google’s attack on the practice of value-based design continues apace, my colleagues & I have been given to a deeper reflection on what tools will facilitate right relationship going forward.

We’re used to technology changing, of course. But we’ve come to rely on our tools for maintaining our client relationships, building infrastructure, and expanding our skillsets. Since value-based design is such a nascent industry, we’ve watched our tools change rather frequently, especially over the past few years.

We’re currently settling on some final recommendations for new tools that are likely to stick around for a while and consciously support small & mid-sized businesses. These will go out to paid members in a couple of weeks. They will involve a complete disengagement from businesses that have consciously proven themselves, through their actions, to be hostile to the business that we wish to practice.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with the creator of a promising new experimentation framework. He asked what he could do to make our relationship positive into the long term. My reply was blunt: don’t fuck us. Why? Because value-based design tools have a long history of fucking us. Now we’re all tired.

What causes someone to embrace value-based design? Do people change their minds as they work in tech?

I’m curious to hear your stories – just hit reply.

This week, for paid members

We’re currently working with a client that knows its problems well and takes steps to solve them. I love this. It is so much nicer to work with clients who get it than to clean up disasters. Disasters may be more lucrative, but ultimately people got to such a place for a reason, and it’s more likely than not that they’ll reject the medicine and backslide quickly after.

This client won’t reject the medicine. They get it. But as you probably know, once you solve a given problem, another, larger, more interesting problem always seems to take its place. And that’s where we find ourselves now, with crunchier issues and deeper questions.

This client knows their customer behavior pretty well. Reorder rate is clearly delineated. Tropes are predictable. We can see a big fall-off after someone’s second purchase, for what amount to good, practical reasons. On a recent call, I looked at these numbers and said “okay, so people are leaving for what we think to be common-sense reasons. Yes?”

Some nods.

I recently read a piece in UX Collective about “the one true way to design”. This week, I want to provide some thoughts on it, and how to read the variable nature of agencies’ design processes.

Yes, every design agency has its own method. We do, too Agencies do this in order to compete effectively, to make clients feel like they are buying something specific to them. And in doing so, we need to play off like our process is better than all of the other processes.

But they are all pretty similar on face! Something unites them. I was a math major, so I often think about first principles – the axioms that we take for granted before creating a body of work. I think design agencies work from a handful of first principles that feel more-or-less uncontroversial:

1. Design is creative work in the service of business goals.
2. Design should focus on uniting customer needs with business goals.
3. Design fundamentally involves talking to those who will use it, so they can have a seat at the table.

As I’m finishing up the first draft of Store Design’s manuscript, I’m curious: what topics around value-based store design do you want us to include?

This week, for paid members

• This fortnight’s teardown is for apparel brand Cuts. They do a lot right!
• And our weekly lesson is about the basic contents of a buy box. What goes in, and what stays out?
• Finally, our design of the week shows a rare hover state that we actually care about & endorse. (No hovers on mobile!)

I’ve been compiling & typesetting the text for Store Design lately, as our first step before a full edit pass. It’s been really nice to get the text all in one place, giving the final work structure & form. I feel like I’ve been making a lot of scaffolding.

The introduction speaks to the spiritual & intellectual impoverishment that obviously exists in contemporary independent ecommerce, and it gets spicier from there. I suspect people will either get it or they won’t. If you’ve been reading our letters over the past few years, none of Store Design will come as much of a surprise. But will the tent expand at all? Do I care?

Draft Revise is once again sold out. Grateful for those who take a chance on our practice. It feels good to exist in right relationship to the practice, to be performing nourishing work again.

Remember that little link I sent along last week saying that we now have a consulting slot open? I am now so busy with prospective calls that this, this is what you get for the weekly letter. I’m almost sorry!

If you wish to work with us in the future, get in touch. We’d be grateful to begin a conversation.

Links

One bespoke consulting slot is available, for kickoff in late May. If you wish to increase your business’s revenue, we invite you to reach out.

Quiet week otherwise, working on Store Design & client projects. Some good links at the bottom. Wishing you all the best as we begin the spring harvest here in Chicago.

This week, for paid members

Howdy! Just wanted to let you know that we’ll be bumping the price of teardowns in 8 hours, at 5p CDT. If you’ve been on the fence, you might want to grab one right now.

We’re also in the process of working on larger teardowns for SaaS businesses, focused on their product direction, feature set, and overall interaction design. Please reach out if you’re interested – just hit reply!

Within ten minutes of my showing up at Microconf’s first event a fortnight ago, someone looked me in the eye and straight-up commanded me to charge more for teardowns. This happened shortly after I did an hour-long in-person teardown for my very nice email provider that was later described as worth the entire time he spent flying out to Denver for the actual conference.

Whenever anyone tells me to hike my prices with that much urgency, I hike my prices. And this particular exhortation came from someone I trust & deeply appreciate. So in one sense, this is all her fault; but in another, more accurate sense, it’s entirely my fault. Or we can blame inflation? Let’s blame inflation. I just adopted a new dog and I’ve been told he has to eat. You could help with that?

So this Friday, May 05 at 5p CDT, I’m hiking the price of teardowns. You may wish to buy yours right now. I am profoundly serious about this and regret nothing.

At MicroConf this past week, someone remarked to me that I tend to write books as a way of marking the ends of eras – implying that Store Design’s release happening at the same time as our repositioning isn’t really an accident.

I don’t know if this is true! I feel like the books are more accretive. I had to write Cadence & Slang I’m still talking about value-based design in everything I do. What happens is that the work discussed in our books becomes additive to the practice. One expands the practice to encompass new work;

Applied here, our prior work on stores is going to infuse our whole design process when we work for more structurally nourishing industries. The Draft Method, devised between 2019 and now, isn’t going away – or even changing much.

What is happening is a comprehensive shift in who we serve, and how we serve them. And we’re doing that with everything we’ve learned & shared over the past 17 years. MicroConf taught me a lot about how we must move. And for now, that must be enough.

Hello! Just a humble reminder that preorders for Store Design wrap up in 8 hours, at 5p CDT.

We’d be honored if you joined us.

As mentioned, we went dark for the past couple of weeks. Here is why: in March of 2020, I bought an infinitely rebookable flight to Japan, because the Bad Times™ were supposed to last six weeks and stuff. Three rebookings later, I teleported out of the hemisphere at maybe the worst time for my business in the history of the universe.

Somehow, nothing collapsed in my absence. (Good job, team, and thanks.) In the meantime, I had a magical experience, one I’ll not soon forget. And now it’s time to get back to work.

Most importantly, Store Design preorders end in 4 days. At that point, the price will go up, and you won’t be able to get our bundle discounts anymore. We’ll also be providing periodic updates exclusively for those who got in early. If you’ve been waffling on joining us, you may wish to do so.

Store Design arrives at a time when ecommerce desperately needs new ideas. We’re honored, now & always, to have the support to make awesome books like this happen. Thanks for reading, and help spread the word!

I’m thrilled to report that Store Design now has enough preorders to cover printing costs. Thanks to everyone who has preordered thus far, and a special thanks to everyone who ordered teardowns & bundles; a few of those over the weekend pushed us over the finish line.

And as mentioned previously, the more we raise, the better the final product. If we get a hundred more preorders, we’ll be able to release Store Design with better paper stock, a nicer cover, and in higher quantities.

Those who have been around these parts for a while – like, since 2009 – know that we are no stranger to crowdfunding. We started on Kickstarter 14 years ago and have run several major campaigns to fund our work. This one, independently run, is comparatively unconventional. Yet it’s still worked.

We’re trusting you to believe in this and spread the word about us, now & always. If you’ve enjoyed our writing about store design, both here & in our paid group, we’d be grateful for you to write some nice things about us & spread the word.

I saw a chart the other day that gave me pause. In it, you have three slices of the total American ecommerce pie: the top 14 publicly-held retailers, Amazon, and everyone else. The latter is about 30% of total online sales in 2022.

On the one hand, that pie is very large, comprising over $1 trillion of annual sales. On the other, I suspect that the slice for direct-to-consumer businesses is even smaller than the aforelinked. And it’s probably decreasing over time.

Between this trend, a general favoring of experiences, inflation, and overall market uncertainty, it’s a rough time. Independent businesses have two options: fight or fold.

You’re probably reading these letters because you fancy yourself the fighting type. Fortunately for us all, there is hope. Niche businesses are doing great, because they can create more effective competitive moats against big players. Smaller addressable markets mean a bigger opportunity for independent businesses to communicate effectively.

After one week of Store Design preorders, a few things have become clear:

• People want the book. (Thank heavens, right?)
• The book is for practitioners, not store owners.
• People are more concerned about how to reliably generate profitable design decisions than we thought.

There’s nothing like a public release to provide clarity on the way you’ll be moving going forward.

Three weeks remain to preorder. Join us.

For those who don’t want to hunt for the link, Store Design preorders are now open. You have two options: take a look and join us now, or read the rest of this bit and join us after you’re done.

Store Design is the culmination of seven years of on-the-ground work. It represents the clearest statement that I think we can possibly make on what store design is, how to practice it, and how to generate outsize profit from it. Unlike those who simply audit stores for a living, Store Design is also backed with considerable on-the-ground experience, facing customers directly to understand how businesses can meet their needs & aspirations.

It’s in that spirit of humility that I offer Store Design, hoping that its message of listening to customer needs and building relationships at scale lands for you. In a world where most trust in institutions writ large has been eroded, I think my design practice has become more urgently focused on restoring integrity to whatever relationships we have. And since store design is my little plot of ground, I work hard to make it as nice of a place as possible. It may not be world peace, but it’s something.

If you’re a store owner and wondering where to start, Store Design is the answer. If you’re an individual practitioner wanting to level up your game, here’s your tool.

Designers are all obsessed with process. I am, too. I think the following is true:

• Unlike the scientific method or any sort of legal method, there is no one “design method” that anyone agrees upon.
• Nobody agrees on what any branch of design is, to the point where DTDT, or “defining the damn thing,” is a common acronym.
• Methodology is a competitive differentiator.

And so, we exist in a realm where the only correct design process is the one that I personally invented.

At the same time, we all steal from each other. My first book is an amalgam of hundreds of sources; it invents hardly anything. (Heck, even the page layout is a ripoff.) Value-Based Design sits on the shoulders of giants, too, from Mike Monteiro’s groundbreaking work to traditional consulting texts on value-based pricing to business books that don’t suck.