How did we design the Merchadise experience?
My Role
Leadership
Strategy
Branding
UI/UX
Date
2022
Client
Merchadise is an end-to-end e-commerce ecosystem for brands and suppliers, offering on-demand service and just-in-time fulfillment for those who want to launch their brand or enlarge their product line. It’s a new vision of manufacturing for brands and suppliers that are suffering from a broken supply chain and a rapidly changing world of e-commerce.
Santiago Fernández
Maximiliano Malisani
Lorenzo Balmaceda
Challenges
Launching the Merchadise brand as a whole for the first time on the market.
Designing the experience and interface of the Merchadise SaaS product, which had a high degree of complexity.
Customizing the experience for each level of user
Collaborating with the leaders of other areas to develop a business strategy that has a clear and consistent direction to be communicated to the rest of the team.
My role
I had the opportunity to assemble a custom team to tackle the issues of UX/UI, Branding and Marketing. This team was composed of a brand designer, a UX/UI designer, a graphic designer, a copywriter and a project manager. A CMO and a growth hacker completed the marketing team. My participation in Merchadise had a term of 8 months, in which I was able to leave a foundational legacy in the processes and in the service.
Process and Deliverables
First, we were able to consolidate the branding. We ran a collaborative workshop with the main leaders to discover the brand's purpose, goals and mission. We also analyzed its audience, personality and competitors. With all these insights, we created a report and began working on the visual aspect, developing a mood board and several rounds of brand design.
After a few rounds of feedback, we consolidated the final branding, which allowed us to focus on setting up three teams: social media, web design, and UX/UI. The social media and website teams shared the same objective: introducing Merchadise’s value proposition, services, areas of expertise and success cases to new clients.
The UX/UI team specifically designed software that managed the creation of new orders for the sales team, in-factory setup and logistics for the production team, and account tracking for the finance team, among other features.
I believe that the two strongest points of the software were 1) the connection with an API that had the ability to show stock from multiple factories when a new order was created, along with details for each order, 2) the detailed information that each order contained, especially everything necessary to work in textile printing.
Like all SaaS, one of the main challenges was designing an experience that adapts to each type of user. Since we didn’t have the time to do deep research due to company needs, I led collaborative work sessions with the product leader, CTO and UX/UI designer. As a deliverable, we managed to write a brief description of each type of user and focused on defining the functionalities that each type of user would need.
In the case of the customer user, we had the opportunity to go into a little more detail. Although we didn’t get the chance to interview real users, we were able to interview the sales leader, customer experience leader, CEO, COO, and CTO. This exercise, in addition to documents we created describing and mapping the ideal customer, also served to align the Merchadise team internally–a fundamental step for a startup in its early stages.
