In December 2018, I Co-Founded – The sustainable sourcing company, A B2B marketplace that makes it easy for small businesses to source sustainable packaging from UK suppliers and manufacturers. My first task as co-founder and lead product designer was to define the brands identity and build an MVP e-commerce platform that we could quickly launch and test. With the support of my team, I researched, designed and launched the UK’s first holistic skincare subscription platform.

For any design project, making sure that we are genuinely solving a problem for our end users is crucial.

I started this process by

1. Identifying our users:

Small business owners sourcing eco-friendly packaging online.

After lots of research, a few issues came to light: accessibility, transparency and convenience are the main issues faced by SMBs when sourcing sustainable packaging online. With all this data gathered we started to work on the solution: A transparent E-commerce platform that customers can trust and where they can easily find and buy sustainable packaging from UK suppliers and manufacturers.

I started this design process by researching all the B2B E-commerce, marketplaces and sourcing platforms that exist in order to understand their user experience and sourcing process. I also tested those platforms in order to identify the main pain points and design the best sourcing experience possible for The sustainable sourcing company. Once my research was done, I started to sketch a few ideas of what the platform could look like and what the process of sourcing could look like. As we needed to build a quick MVP I started to research the best e-commerce platform that we could use to easily build and sell those products on. Among them all, Shopify appeared to be the best platform to build, design and launch the marketplace.

For any design project, determining the proper visual language is crucial. I started this process by defining the brand identity for The sustainable sourcing company. I then created a Design system using the existing style library from the Shopify E-commerce template selected to build the E-commerce platform, which allowed me to make conscious changes that better advance the user experience while still maintaining the overall look and feel of the brand.

I started to map the user flow using the E-commerce Shopify template selected, in order to design the best sourcing process for our users. After that, I started to build the wireframes and prototype using the brand identity and design system. Once the prototype was ready I started to implement this flow and those designs into the Shopify template selected to make sure that it matches our final design and the brand identity.

In order to validate and improve our prototype, we decided to organise a quick qualitative user test. To do that we prepared the prototype and contacted 5 small business owners to test the prototype using the beta live website. The results of the test were overall very positive. For task 1 – All businesses owners understood what our business was about and really liked the eco-credentials displayed on the homepage, For task 2 – All users told us that it was super quick and easy to search and buy a product.

With all the feedback collected from our research and user testing, we have been able to build the final prototype for The sustainable sourcing company. To make The sustainable sourcing company more relevant to today’s E-commerce platforms and small business owners sourcing sustainable packaging online, we created a simple and modern E-commerce website and adapted the website pages to mobile, providing consumers tools and content that they can access on any device.

We decided to design a clean and modern homepage including the ‘scroll’ functionality, to allow our audience to seamlessly learn about the brand and our commitment to the planet. The scroll capability gave our users the opportunity to discover all our new products and categories as well as being able to view all our eco-certifications without ever having to click away from the page.

Toward the middle of the homepage just after the products sections, we decided to add the customers’ reviews section to serve as social proof and gain more conversion on orders rate.

Over the first few months after our launch, our new content and website design allowed us to reach:

24K+ direct google searches quarterly

100% customer satisfaction

Attracting customers such as Redbull UK, Levis Strauss, Missguided and interest from leading venture capital firms such as Bain Capital Ventures and Atomico.

Over time we noticed a few issues with the website:

Customers from other countries were trying to order our products but couldn’t because we were only selling in the UK.

A few customers were trying to search products by size and were unable to because we didn’t have this feature yet.

Orders were not always easy to manage due to the lack of APIs to connect suppliers to our platform.

The next steps to improve the overall experience on the site were:

Implement an API,

allow customers to search for products by size and…

expand to other countries outside the UK.