Preorders for my next book, Store Design, go live in precisely one fortnight, on Tuesday, March 07. By that point, the first draft will be done enough that I will be able to call it “done,” for some value of done.

I am kind of terrified about this! What if nobody spreads the word about it? What if the 20 people who bought our first-draft zines about store design don’t come back? What if it flops?

Well, then maybe I’ll make something smaller & simpler. Unlike a typical crowdfunding campaign, I deliberately don’t have a minimum number of orders on this. Ultimately the goal is to make a print book, and the quality of the book will befit the number of orders we’ll get. I’ll do it print-on-demand if I have to. (I know. I know.) I’ll do it on cheap paper, as a trade paperback. (It might be cooler that way?) And if we get “enough,” for the value of enough that befits the print quality I’ve done in the past, it will be offset, fancy paper, hardcover, foil-stamped, etc etc etc. (The text is one color and one typeface, by design.) But I’m going to do it. I already have the typeface; I have the budget to hire an editor. The more money this makes, the better the book will be. That incentivizes you to spread the word about it – since the more people who preorder, the better it will turn out.

The preorder period will last for a month. Once it closes, we look at how much money we made, and budget accordingly – and we hike the price for everyone else, of course.

On the one hand, Google Optimize shutting down is a big deal. It’s absolutely going to change the pricing structures of the experimentation industry, mostly for the better. In the meantime, everyone should be concerned about one company consolidating power for six years, and then walking out of the room when it suits them.

On the other, I kind of… don’t care? Perhaps I have moved into a state of acceptance. I have been here before. Being an evergreen process, design does not care what tools you use. If Adobe buys your tool, you can use a different tool. If Google shuts your tool down, you can use a different tool. The goal is to practice design in a way that feels nourishing and creates positive business outcomes.

Business does not profit from Google Optimize. It profits from the results that a tool like Google Optimize is able to create. Google Optimize is not the only tool, and it never has been. The goal is not to run experiments, and it never has been. The goal is to use design as a tool for generating profit.

Grieve first, then act.

Google are not a trustworthy company.

For two decades, they have built products that boldly enter industries, used its advertising business to prop up margins internally, and then exited when they aren’t making enough money to support those independent products. This happened with project management tools, RSS readers, and chat. If you wish for more details, you may visit the graveyard.

So when Google announced that Optimize, its once-beleaguered online experimentation tool, was getting a serious upgrade in 2016, I was skeptical. I put a lot of effort into understanding the ins & outs of an experimentation framework – and at the time, I was all-in on a competitor. My A/B testing framework is a load-bearing component of my job. I didn’t want to become dependent on Google to do my job, only to have them pull the rug.

At the same time, I looked at the competition. My platform of choice, VWO, had not updated their JavaScript tech stack in the five years I’d been using it. (They still have not, forcing an incorrect sideloading of jQuery 1.x on every customer session.) They hiked their pricing, limited my agency account, and started to strong-arm me into onerous long-term contracts. I looked at Optimizely and discovered an even worse situation, with “call us” pricing and five-figure enterprise-level contracts.

In quiet, reflective observation of the national holiday that is my birthday, Draft will be closed tomorrow.

Speaking of Draft, we celebrated 11 years in business this past Friday. Thanks for all of your support, now & always.

We were recently quoted in Shopify’s roundup of 2023 ecommerce trends, alongside a lot of people who are smarter than us. Take a look, and celebrate with us by setting all trends on fire.

Draft has three goals in 2023:

• Finish Store Design and open preorders.
• Ruggedize our consulting operations by solving expensive problems for more consciously wallet-out industries.
• Create a less adversarial, more collaborative sales process for ecommerce.

I’ll be expanding on the third point today.

Since we’re a consultancy, our whole thing is that we sit on the same side of the table as you, trying to solve problems together. Yet in contemporary ecommerce, there exists an adversarial dynamic between store owners and those who can serve them.

I’m working on the next book, and almost ready to take preorders, and I’m curious: what big questions are you facing around the topic of store design right now? Hit reply and let me know.

In the meantime, new text is coming.

This week, for paid members

I have a weird relationship to work. My job is one of my making, so I should probably love it, right? And I do, because I get to write this, in the blazing sun, in Marseille, a light breeze coming in through the window, drinking sencha that I brought from Japan to Chicago to here. I’ll be here until March, waiting out another harsh winter back home.

Last year was hard on my relationship to the practice. I was mostly ignored or denigrated by an addressable market that clearly didn’t want to buy design, despite everyone saying that it did. I lost sight of how to communicate to a market that is mostly focused on the psychic sugar highs of “quick wins” and quantitative dashboards. Now I’m getting back to it. Deep rest is medicine. But I’m still hurting, questioning whether this is the correct relationship that I should be establishing to my work, trying to find greener pastures.

I’ll work at Draft until I die, of course, but who Draft works for is now quite open for debate. You understand design or you do not. You buy design because you want design, or you do not. It’s not my responsibility to make anyone want design, any more than I can make anyone want to run their businesses more ethically, or in a more customer-focused way.

The coming months will witness a deep reset for us. I’m excited to have a new job by the end of the year. I suspect it will look quite a bit like the old one, with one key difference.

This is our final update before we return for the new year in a few weeks.

As a reminder, this is the last week to order books & pins. At 5pm CST on Friday, December 23, Draft will close for deep rest, with shipments paused until March.

Deeply grateful for your support, now & always.

I received a question lately about the role of value-based design. Now that we’re in recession and tech companies are laying off a bunch of workers, how will designers’ practices shift?

I must admit that I didn’t know how to answer the question, other than to say I feel bad for anyone who has been impacted, and that design, in its purest expression, serves commerce, and is hence value-based.

The closer you can get to a direct leverage on profit generation, the more likely your work will be valued going forward. No matter your circumstances right now, the question remains: going forward, how will your work directly support profit generation?

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Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Helium Customer Fields!

Name. Email. Password. If you want to add anything else to your customer sign-up form on Shopify, tough luck. Customer Fields can help. Create registration forms as unique as your business. Add new fields, get new email subscribers, or let customers edit their account info. 14-day free trial.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Helium Customer Fields!

Helium Customer Fields

Name. Email. Password. If you want to add anything else to your customer sign-up form on Shopify, tough luck. Customer Fields can help. Create registration forms as unique as your business. Add new fields, get new email subscribers, or let customers edit their account info. 14-day free trial.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Helium Customer Fields!

Helium Customer Fields

Name. Email. Password. If you want to add anything else to your customer sign-up form on Shopify, tough luck. Customer Fields can help. Create registration forms as unique as your business. Add new fields, get new email subscribers, or let customers edit their account info. 14-day free trial.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

In the past, I’ve referred frequently to the idea of uncertainty. I wrote a book about uncertainty, and then I co-hosted a podcast about uncertainty. I refer explicitly to the current moment being uncertain in my pricing documents.

Are we really all that uncertain, though?

• We are structurally aware, in a public health sense, of what is about to happen with respect to the current pandemic, as well as future pandemics.
• We are societally aware of our likely responses in the collective.
• We are able to more-or-less reliably predict the various outcomes of this election, as well as near-future elections.
• We are aware of what is happening with respect to the supply chain, and we have experience in its attendant knock-on effects in the rest of ecommerce.
• We are aware of what is happening within social media, and recognize the complete unsuitability of reliance on paid ad revenue to drive customer acquisition.

None of this is unconditionally good or bad. It just is. The question is how you will react to it.

Why “BFCM tips” don’t work

In our latest lesson, we talked about what stores should do for the holidays this year.

Like all of our lessons, it is actionable. You can do things after reading it. But given the subject matter, it is probably a great deal less actionable than most of you would think, and it is definitely a lot more muted than you would think.

Every time a value-based designer sticks the landing on BFCM weekend, they feel like this gif. Value-based design is a long-term practice involving slow, deep, patient work. BFCM is one weekend in a vast year. If you do the necessary work to understand your customers and make the numbers go up for the other 361 days of the year, then BFCM is yours to lose.

We are seeking one more client for optimization work. Throw your email address here to begin a conversation.

This week, for paid members

A busy week!

The fourth zine in our series about store design is now available. It’s about the highly profitable act of usability testing.

On text, I wrote a little bit about the new dialectic.

Now that we’re no longer working to secure another client, we have been doing more of our favorite thing: research. In particular, we have been researching our crowded industry, looking at what other optimization agencies do.

After a brief period where Draft had three open slots for consulting work, we now have two. Throw your info over here if you’d like to begin a conversation, or get started today with a roadmap.

Our repositioning, of course, is continuing apace. We seek to structurally ruggedize the business against what we view as an ongoing state of global crisis. More specifically, direct-to-consumer ecommerce has always had significant issues, which we’ve outlined in multiple threads. These issues are exposed by collapse.

Towards that end, we are acutely aware of our ability to generate outsize economic value, especially in solving expensive problems for larger ($10M+ ARR) software & ecommerce businesses. After all, the larger the business, the greater the value. Others are aware of this, too. Draft hasn’t been open to the possibility of custom work in almost a decade. We are now.

As a result, if you’re interested in pursuing one-off projects that are focused on customer retention, education, and increased lifetime value, hit reply to this email and get in touch. We don’t bite.

I wrote a thread on Black Friday optimization, and learned that everybody loves it when I say objectively correct things. Noted!

A note on duck tests

I’m the latest guest on the Milk Bottle podcast, talking about your favorite topic: store design. In it, I talked a little about a major experiment that we ran for the Wander Club, where we provided tiered discounting for their entire product line. Conversions doubled overnight, and they ended up expanding their business significantly.

As we move into the fourth quarter of 2022 and contemplate a structural repositioning, I want to provide some reflections on the role of design, and how it can properly serve online stores.

It begins with a tweet from my pal Cennydd:

Design should be actively hostile to business as usual. Business as usual is killing us.

No matter what you think about design, the second sentence of this is objectively correct. Does anyone think DTC is doing okay right now? Does anyone have a sense of optimism about it?