Investment mindset, what’s broken in DTC, genderless design
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.
I wrote that thread on a Friday, edited it over the weekend, and posted it on Monday morning. While I was putting this all together, I saw someone respected in the field asking for offshore designers, presumably in the capacity of store maintenance.
I don’t mean to put that guy on blast; his tweet is one of many that indicate a more fundamental problem. Design, as a practice, is incorrectly perceived in DTC. It is viewed as the design system, the front end, the coat of paint. It is lowercase-d design. In this thread, I’m trying to argue for design as capital-D Design, as something more expansive and all-encompassing. Beyond the coat of paint, it includes:
- User experience design
- Usability
- Qualitative research (interviews, usability tests, surveys, et. al.)
- A/B testing
- Measurement
I wrote about this more generally in my latest book. Applied to stores, we see numerous operational challenges & cultural headwinds against the deep psychic acceptance of design, at every level of the organization, including & especially those in power in the organization.
I am deeply grateful to those who have noticed & boosted this thread over the past week, and for the conversations that I’ve had all week about it. Without a focus on customer needs & real evidence, I believe that DTC will lose in the long term. You’re competing against a company that heard a cry for free 2-day shipping from its customers and responded by building an entire national delivery network of its own. What are you doing to listen to your customers?
This week, for paid members
- We threw our monthly office hours this past week, talking about all sorts of fun issues in value-based design.
- Our latest teardown is for running brand Satisfy.
- And our design of the week discusses what happens when you A/B test your add-to-cart buttons without properly DOM-parsing every state of a key element.
Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.
Links & analysis
- A couple of people have pinged me with this lovely post about genderless design, which I strongly recommend you read in full. (Related: this post about gender & leveraged power structures.) I don’t talk a whole lot about my being non-binary on this list, because it’s not germane to the practice of design on a day-to-day basis, but gosh, did this one hit. I think the possibility of pure gender neutrality is mostly a myth, at least right now. We probably exist in a bit of a liminal state, where any sort of “third” or “separate” gender identity is inarticulably nascent, and will take a couple of generational cycles to truly emerge as a whole concept. I myself move extremely slowly with respect to my own explorations, mostly because I would prefer to measure twice & cut once, and not really work my shit out in public. I do think that design can absolutely express principles of toxic masculinity, which is perhaps a shorter way of expressing 1,200 words where I called out my own industry for not going through its own necessary ego death. One should be mindful of the ways in which this continues to manifest. A more expansive, inclusive future is worth fighting for.
- “Listen to users, but only 85% of the time.” Put another way: blend qualitative & quantitative research. Listen to users in different ways, different proportions of the time.
- Steal this glyph. Related: Copy Paste Character.
This month’s free lesson: What holds someone back from investing in optimization?
We often joke that our biggest competitor here at Draft is fear – but it’s not really a joke. In an ideal world, the process would go like this:
- Client is making enough sales to run statistically significant A/B tests during a “slow” period.
- Client hires Draft.
- Draft optimizes store during slow period.
- ARPU goes up.
- Slow period ends, fast period begins.
- Client makes lots of money.
Here is how the process often goes:
- Client is making enough sales to run statistically significant A/B tests during a “slow” period.
- Client talks to us on the phone, expressing excitement.
- Client becomes afraid of cashflow and doesn’t invest in the future of their business.
- Slow period ends, fast period begins.
- Client makes money, but nowhere near as much money as if they had hired us earlier.
- Client hires Draft.
- Draft optimizes store during the tail end of the fast period.
- ARPU goes up.
- Slow period hits.
- Client makes way less money.
Or, even worse:
- Client is making enough sales to run statistically significant A/B tests during a “slow” period.
- Client talks to us on the phone, expressing excitement.
- Client becomes afraid of cashflow and doesn’t invest in the future of their business.
- Slow period ends, fast period begins.
- Client makes money, but nowhere near as much money as if they had hired us earlier.
- Client uses “bad times” as excuse to not hire Draft.
Or, worse than that:
- Client is making enough sales to run statistically significant A/B tests during a “slow” period.
- Client talks to us on the phone, expressing excitement.
- Client becomes afraid of cashflow and hires a “CRO expert” growth hacker who doesn’t understand prioritization, project management, execution, or the management of messy human feelings.
- “Expert” screws up their store and/or does nothing.
- Client becomes jilted on the whole process of store design, and never hires Draft.
Ultimately, clients will be psychically open to the possibility of buying design from us, or they won’t. There is little we can do in the sales process to agitate clients towards a solution when they are constantly afraid of cashflow and fail to possess an investment mindset. We cannot impart a correct investment mindset on a thirty-minute sales call. It must be cultivated and practiced prior to the call. This is your responsibility as a business owner.
It’s on us at Draft to create pricing structures that match your need to maintain cashflow while paying us fairly. We’re a high-end design consultancy, based in America, and we charge accordingly. It’s on you to know who’s sitting across from you, and to ask questions around pricing & payment that treat us with dignity & respect. We are both on the same side of the table, wanting to get a deal done.
So, with all of that in mind, what are the biggest headwinds facing clients’ ability to buy design?
- Poor budgeting. We’ve touched on this for paid members, and talked about it in our recent thread, but: store owners incorrectly lump all of their store’s maintenance into the marketing budget, rather than making a special line item that earmarks the necessary tasks of store maintenance as an ongoing concern. We find stores budget poorly in general, providing too much money to new customer acquisition, too little to retention, and far too much to paid advertising. Design suffers as a result.
- Cognitive biases. Business owners don’t know how to adopt the sort of mindset that allows them to view work in terms of its return on investment. As a result, design, a reliably high-ROI activity, is likely to be put on the back burner in favor of short-term work.
- Prior experiences with low-quality designers. “CRO” has been applied broadly, with little certification or qualification. Few people who actually practice CRO are good at it, and the ones who are good at it cost more.
- The belief that their store is “good enough.” It isn’t.
These are just a few things, but really, in 2022, the biggest answer is fear. Fear holds everyone back. Fear keeps you from investing in the future of your business. Fear keeps you from the truth of what your customers belief.
If you act expecting a dark future, then you will create it.