David Kind

Proving the Concept

When we sat down with Dave for the first time, we both thought that we would be discussing an e-commerce website. However, by the end of the meeting, we concluded that the right place to start was with custom software to support the unique service aspect of his business. In four weeks, we prototyped a styling and order fulfillment system. It wasn't pretty, but it didn't need to be — as a proof of concept, it helped him secure capital and begin to run trials with customers, using Facebook to acquire and style initial users.

Once we had created the foundation for the business, we turned our efforts to customer acquisition. Over the next several months, we experimented with value propositions, imagery, and colors to create a landing page that represented the brand and appealed to the right users.

Initial Successes and Speed Bumps

After David Kind’s MVP launch, Philosophie and Dave worked together to figure out what to do next. We needed to establish a continuous product development cycle so that we could expand the system as new customers came in and business opportunities arose.

Establishing a cadence was critical to keeping the site stable. Dave had plenty of ideas for what to build next, but how could we build it fast without breaking things?

The answer was to take a data-driven approach to prioritize features. Following the MVP, we established a process for every sprint review:

A Pleasurable Shopping Experience for Customers

On the consumer-facing side, we designed around customer pain points by observing analytics and gathering user feedback with Mixpanel and UserTesting. Early on, we noticed that users tended to drop off while requesting a stylist. To remedy this drop off, we tried a number of things.

In the original five-step onboarding process, we prompted users to create an account, fill out their account preferences, upload a photo of themselves and submit it to be reviewed by a stylist. We hypothesized that users weren’t interested in filling out their account details to start, they just wanted to get started right away. So we eliminated that portion altogether.

We used A/B testing to measure success. We released new versions of the onboarding process to 50% of customers at a time, while the other 50% saw the old version. This allowed us to observe user behavior and determine which version was more effective. In the end, we found that shortening the five-step process to three steps did improve the conversion rate, especially for mobile users.

A Lean and Scalable Admin

As demand grew, we needed to iterate on the design of the admin system. Dave needed to hire more stylists. However, the admin system was buckling under the weight of more stylists and many more customers. Stylists didn’t know which customers had already been served and they didn’t know which trays to fill.

Dave told us about this during a sprint review and we brainstormed together. We drew our own solutions separately and then shared ideas. This divergence and convergence let us understand the problem from different perspectives. Thanks to this “design studio”, we arrived at a simple but valuable solution. The level of effort to build this feature was trivial and it afforded Dave’s team the ability to scale with their growth.

Embrace the Suck

In developing this feature, we coined a new phrase: “Embrace the suck”. If we didn’t have such close and frequent contact with Dave, and share the day-to-day pains of his business, we may not have discovered this problem as quickly.

Early Buzz

Too often, consumer startups underestimate the amount of money and effort that goes into marketing and customer acquisition. As a fashion and lifestyle brand, David Kind focused on pairing a superior product with an unparalleled customer experience. As a result, we received awesome reviews from customers and bloggers: