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 don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense to do this if you assume the worst of us, or if you think we’re out to “get” you somehow. Draft is here to help you. Our partners are here to help you. We don’t want to help people who don’t want our help, who can’t capitalize from our help, and especially who don’t need our help – no matter how much they think they need us.
In any consultative business, one must exclusively sell to businesses that can directly benefit from the economic impact of their work. Draft works for stores precisely because they are able to benefit from our work, not because of some broader calling or specific interest.
We also tailor our offerings to your needs, no matter the size. If you’re small, you get a teardown. If you’re larger and have a developer retained, you get a full consulting engagement.
What happened in ecommerce that made so many store owners suspicious of buying work from qualified professionals? My suspicion is twofold. First, economic uncertainty increased the amount of fear in economic buyers, who are now less sure about investing in new work. And second, it became harder to prove expertise in the industry because of copycats and low-quality offerings.
To respond to the former point, we wrote a whole book about this, and then we recorded a whole podcast about this. On the latter point, we’d like to believe that the unprofessional, incompetent actions of others do not bear on us, but ultimately we also recognize that in design as in life, you get what you pay for. And people are trying to get a deal.
Of course, the structural unwillingness to economically support design indicates a psychic and spiritual impoverishment in the DTC ecommerce industry. This is witnessed despite our domain expertise and proven track record. This is more broadly witnessed despite the ability of an entire thriving industry of technologists & experts that exist solely to profitably resolve expensive problems for online stores.
As a result, we’ve reworked our sales process to be more collaborative. If you say you don’t have the budget to buy design, we’re going to ask to look at your budget and find the money. If you’re afraid about buying design, we’ll put you in touch with some of our past clients, all of whom are rather happy about having hired us. And if you’re unsure whether our work will be cost effective, we’ll talk about specifically what is needed out of the whole team to profitably move our work across the finish line.
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This week, for paid members
- Continuing in our series of lessons on how to find more structurally nourishing pastures for design, our next lesson is about how to correctly budget for the necessary act of store design.
- Our fortnightly teardown is for CBD seltzer brand Recess. They get a bit of a mixed score. What works well, and what did they need to QA?
- And our design of the week covers a curious new labeling convention for a store’s ATC buttons. It works pretty well!
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Links
- Onboarding for more complex software. Related.
- Own your data.
- NN/group has created two compendia of design guidelines: first for patterns, and next for mobile experience.