Implementation
Our group began this stage thinking about how our solution, a marketplace, would be implemented. We approached this stage with the “moment of truth” method, committing to the idea of a shopping marketplace that would allow our consumers to shop in alignment with their values and to trust that we as a business we’re curating a shopping experience that only showcased sellers that met our ethical criteria in three key value areas. We committed as a group to see this through to fruition, and even thought about an extended product roadmap, with an eventual expansion of shopping verticals and associated consumer values by which to rate sellers. We then started along the “time and task” technique, though admittedly we focused more on the tasks at hand and focused the “time” component more on how we would dedicate our time during our collective meetings, then letting the time outside of group meetings be task-driven and have the individuals determine how much time they would devote to those tasks. These tasks included further research into how we could be rating companies as well as how competitors and similar companies were structuring their products, time spent determining our financial structure, and looking and how consumers prefer shopping today.
These methods and techniques both took the larger action methods of first translating and digesting, and then writing it out. We had to translate our complex situations (wanting to create an ethical Amazon) into smaller, digestible entities that we could tackle, which was honing in on one specific vertical to attack, and three core values to assess our sellers by. As we moved through this we wrote out ideas to communicate them and keep record of those thought processes.
In thinking about how we would pitch our ideas to various stakeholders we thought first about who those key stakeholders would be. We landed on investors, industry partners, consumers and eventually our board. For our investors we wanted to focus on how we would make money as a company, and thought a lot about how we can employ drop shipping which allows a low barrier to entry and potentially quick upside. We would also speak to them about the gaining momentum of this movement around consumers wanting to spend their money with companies that align with their personal values. For our industry partners, we would want to focus our pitch around the opportunity for them to become “certified” by our ethical standards and to be placed along like-minded sellers that would put them in front of their target market and allow for brand discovery. Because these consumers are value-driven, these would also likely be more loyal consumers, and would be more likely to be spreading the word to their friends because of that inherent passion for the mission. How we sell to consumers aligns with how we would market our product, and in both cases we would focus on having the best brands and creating trust by showing our consumers how we evaluate and certify our sellers, so that not only are they impressed by the products we carry, they are proud to share that they are purchasing from such ethical brands.
As a team we landed on making our marketplace a website designed for desktop since our anecdotal research showed that when it comes to fashion, most consumers are purchasing via desktop. As we started to think about what we wanted out website to include, we thought it was best to create a visual website infrastructure chart, that showed the content of the site mapped out. Based on this initial chart we plan to then create wireframes to show these different webpages in a more flushed out, but still fairly low fidelity way, which will allow us to show which information each page will contain. From there we will continue to increase fidelity until we are able to program the website and create a first actionable prototype. Alongside this prototyping phase it will be important for us to come up with the research supporting our first round of sellers on the site and exactly how we go about rating these sellers. Our accreditation process will definitely be subject to scrutiny, so we need to have that locked in and have that be something that will stand up in the face of challenges.