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.

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!

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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.

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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?

As consulting goes, we sell materially three things:

• Teardowns
• Research-driven optimization consulting
• Research-driven audits & prioritized strategy

These all have names, but you don’t care, because ultimately you’re buying an outcome.

Still, the names that I gave these three things are bad. One of them is nine years old. The other is seven. They were born of an industry, and a time, that looked a lot different than things do right now, both in terms of who we serve and what we do for them.

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Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Blink!

Blink is a specialist eCommerce SEO agency, grounded in data science. We know eCommerce – and DTC – inside out, and typically we grow organic revenue by at least 100% with 12 months for our clients. To find out more visit blinkseo.co.uk or follow us on LinkedIn.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

We’ve been posting more mastheads to Applied Draft. Take a look!

And today, a big announcement: we’re the latest guest on the Unofficial Shopify Podcast, talking about all things store design & consulting. Tune in!

This week, for paid members

Last week I did something that I almost never do: I got angry on the internet, and wrote a thread on a very bad website.

I think in ways that necessitate long-form communication. I craft complex arguments from basic principles. I work in systems thinking, and systems are always gnarly. My client reports routinely top 3,000 words – and they are edited down to that length. So I consider a 1,200-word thread to be on the short end of something that distills a complex idea, conveys it to the public, and proposes next steps.

Twitter is not the right place for me to exist in right relationship to the kinds of ideas that I like to convey. For that reason, while I definitely think my mailing list is the better channel for following me, I was nudged to do this by a dear friend & trusted colleague, because Twitter is going to represent a different sort of audience, and because threads appear to be the coin of the realm in DTC these days.

I invite you to take a careful look at the thread right now. It’s a 10-minute read that should hopefully shift your thinking about what design is, and how stores should invest in it.

We’ve written a lot about home page mastheads for our members over the past year, for a few reasons:

• They are a high point of conversion, since they represent most customers’ first impressions of your business.
• They are politically fraught, making them an important aspect of consultative work.
• They are usually poorly executed, with generic copy, features that don’t matter to customers, etc.

So we’re going to start picking apart a few stores’ mastheads every week. Some of them are good. Most of them are not. All of them need some form of improvement.

Subscribe via RSS and you’ll learn something.

New zine alert: I am slowly expanding on the themes in Store Design. The first installment is on heat & scroll maps. You can grab a copy of You installed a heat & scroll mapping tool on your store, signed up for a paid plan, and then never used it for some reason right now, at the bottom of this page. Go forth!

I’ve been on a few interviews lately, and every time, people ask me if I’m afraid. Afraid of the world collapsing, afraid of global conflict, afraid of the supply chain, afraid of the stupid virus, afraid of all of it. I tell them the truth every time, which is that I am not afraid.

I’m not afraid of too many things. I don’t fear death. I don’t think I fear my surroundings very much right now. I don’t know what to fear, or what comes next, and so I would rather be grateful for my conscious existence in the present moment than panic about imminent societal collapse.

As we move into the busy season, I’ve been thinking about how I’ll be spending our time at Draft, and what really matters to me in my life.

In past years, I would work really hard from August until around the second week of December, when economy shipping deadlines would hit. Then I would drop off the face of the earth from then until March.

This year will be a little different, for a few reasons:

• The only important thing I launched this year, text, is both fun for me to make and generating a small profit. People seem to love reading it, to the point where it has become many others’ “drop everything and read this” newsletter, even though it is not a newsletter, only text, an endless & beautiful avalanche of text. I like focusing on text. I think text is worth my heartbeats.
• I have enough money to make it through the rest of the year. If nobody pays me to do anything between now and December 31, Draft will lose a small amount of money, but ultimately we’ll be fine.
• Society is fractally collapsing.
• I’m tired.
• So are you.

The busy season is approaching. If you want to work together, please buy a teardown or get in touch.

This week, for paid members

• This month’s deep-dive presentation covers four different 201-level interview techniques that work especially well during global recession & societal collapse. Timely!
• Our weekly paid lesson talks about how to research, execute, and adapt to major changes in your store’s positioning. Sometimes you need to serve a different sort of customer, or solve a different sort of problem!
• Our design of the week tracks a very subtle free shipping threshold. Did you miss it?

People have been enjoying text lately. If you’ve been around these parts for a while and you want more writing about life stuff, you might want to join us.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for new camera brand Hung Supply.
• Our weekly paid lesson is all about the relationship between optimization & development. In what ways do they connect with one another, and in what ways can they work together to improve executional velocity?
• And finally, our design of the week covers an interesting add-to-cart button. That’s it! That’s all I’m telling you about it. If you want to know more, you know what to do.

Limited copies of Store Design are still available.

This week, for paid members

• Our design of the week is for the funniest pagination we’ve ever seen. Should pagination be funny? The answer is no.
• And our weekly paid lesson is a big one, talking about BI dashboards and what they can teach us. Dashboard maintenance is effectively a full-time role – making sure the data is clean, and providing actionable insights with it. We used to do this as a standalone offering, but we found that it really requires a solid 40 hours per week of work, and so we think internal resourcing is the way to go. Nonetheless, stores have a need for this, and they want to know where to start. So let’s talk about it!

Today, I’m thrilled to announce a new text on how to get started with design for your store. It’s called Store Design, and it’s out now.

You are never “done” designing your store. There’s always new customer insights to gather, new things to fix, new issues to uncover. This is the most exciting part of design! Once you’re done fixing all the low-hanging fruit, that’s when your job gets really interesting.

At the same time, we’ve found that most people don’t know how to peel back these layers. They think design is just the surface layer of the store. Maybe more sophisticated store owners think design is the layout of the buy box, or the placement & treatment of upsells.

We take a more expansive view of design – because after a decade of hands-on experience, we’ve come to realize that “design” is often the right answer to the question. Store Design gets you in the right mindset – by redefining what you think “design” is, making the case for a clear design process in any store, and providing some clear next steps for you to take.

Last week, we mentioned an improvement to teardowns for store owners. Here it is: if you’re a store owner, buying a teardown also gets you a half-hour strategy call for free. That also means: if you buy a teardown on behalf of a store owner, they get a half-hour strategy call for free.

That’s it. Please clap.

This week, for paid members

For those of you who subscribed because I wrote about a sandwich eight years ago, I have written about a sandwich again. You may wish to subscribe to text to read it.

On the Draft front, we’re improving our teardowns. More on that shortly. Reply if you’re interested in being a beta tester.

This week, for paid members

This week, for paid members

• Our paid lesson takes a brief shift away from mindset issues and talks about segmentation. How do you figure out what segments are likely to have an impact on your conversion strategy, and how can you thoughtfully research for them?
• And our design of the week discusses the weirdest use case we’ve ever seen on a product detail page.

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for clean beauty brand Elate.
• Our design of the week is all about an, uh, interesting link target from a home page masthead.
• This week’s paid lesson discusses when & how to resource for new initiatives. What does communication look like? How about turnaround? What would a home run look like when hiring for your business?

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

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Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

I’d like to thank everyone for their interest in our relaunch of Draft Revise. In the process of sifting through questions, I realized that I put together something over our holiday break, but I never posted it here.

We think a lot about optimization maturity here at Draft. Optimization maturity is the level of experience, sophistication, and process that you have with researching customers, careful experimentation, and revenue recapture.

Your familiarity with optimization dictates our ability to execute. And it also affects the sort of consultative education that we need to do on a day-to-day basis. We put together a spreadsheet that shows how optimization maturity progresses over time, and you can download it for free here.

We tend to find that organizations improve in their maturity by the time we’re done working with them, but only in a linear basis: they increase in maturity in a predictable fashion, moving from one set of expectations to the next.

Early spring is the right time to begin optimizing your store. We’ve been saying so for 8 years now. So it’s probably not a surprise that spring is when we always do our big launches.

We have one thing left that we’d like to talk about today: Draft Revise.

Draft Revise is our flagship consulting service, operating continuously since August of 2012. Slowly but surely, Draft Revise has evolved into what you see now: a research-first, design-driven optimization practice, proven to get results.

The constraints

The subject line pretty much says it, yes? Enrollment wraps up for these two courses at 5pm CDT today:

• Draft Analysis
• Ecommerce Email Mastery

Don't sleep! Ping us if you have any last-minute questions, we're around all day.

Some updates

• We cleaned up the place a little. New colors, better buttons, spicier home page, overhauled nav.
• Enrollment in Draft Plan is ongoing.
• We have 1-week turnarounds for teardowns. This is the lowest it can get, don’t sleep!
• Thanks to some updates on our merchant’s end, we now accept instant ACH payment for all of our products, as well as several major third-party payment providers. You can buy our stuff with Apple Pay now! The future!
• Due to gestures grandly, we have had to change the list of countries that we deliver our books, zines, and posters to. In short, if your country can’t accept international priority mail packages, or if delivery logistics have become too complex to reliably guarantee arrival, we aren’t going to be able to ship there for the time being. For those who still want to receive our shipments (as well as other shipments from the States), we suggest Earth Class Mail as an affordable way to accept & forward our books in the future.
• Finally, as we mentioned earlier, we’re going to be pausing sales of some of our older courses. Enroll in Ecommerce Email Mastery and Draft Analysis before 5pm CDT on Friday, April 22.

This week, for paid members

I’m deeply grateful to everyone for their interest in Draft Plan this past week. Before registration closes, I wanted to answer some questions that people have had:

What should I hope to get out of this?

Ideally, you will radically shift your work practice to embrace value-based design principles. If you’ve read our book but are stuck on the how, or you already have an existing practice but are curious how to take it to the next level, Draft Plan is for you.

What if I’m not DTC?

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