Order41
A new B2B platform for buying and selling fashion
Order41 is a B2B SaaS platform for the fashion industry that makes it easier for distributors, brands and retailers to sell and buy fashion.
My Role
I was a founding member of the leadership team at Order41, where I shaped the business and product strategy, crafted the UX vision and concept for the web app and built organizational structures to support growth and success.
The Problem
Excel is still a thing
Small and medium sized businesses in the fashion industry are still relying a lot on manual processes and Excel sheets when it comes to ordering products with brands or selling stock to retailers.
While Excel definitely has it´ s advantages, manual processes associated with it are mostly error prone and time consuming.
Order41 offers an eCommerce solution that makes selling and buying much easier and faster by connecting distributors, brands and retailers on one digital B2B platform.
The Solution
A state of the art platform
We built a B2B platform for fashion and lifestyle brands, that let them serve all markets with the right products, prices, and campaigns.
A new onboarding flow that empowers customers to make their sales faster, experience the full potential of the platform and drastically reduces manual work through smart data syncing features.
A dashboard that offers customers a quick view of the health of their business. Also introduced dark-mode as one element towards an overall improved user experience.
Redesigned the whole buying journey. Large scale imagery, a new and easy to use variant selection and smart bulk order editing features improve the buying experience significantly and make it a pleasure.
Wow, still here?
I know, things got a bit longer…
The first part was about the results and now I will show you some of the research and background that went into the making of this.
Research & Analysis
How to fix a car with a running engine while driving
When I joined Order41 there was already a working product and a customer base that generated substantial revenues which is a good indicator for initial product-market fit. Problem was: The web app still had more the look and feel of an advanced prototype that did not communicate the value of the product.
The user interface layout, information architecture, user flows and also certain features had just evolved with every demand from customers without a proper vision or product strategy.
It is hard to say “no” to customers when you are at the starting point of your business.
In addition to the challenges described above, Order41 was on the verge of changing from a small digital tool to a platform product with all the supply and demand issues that come with building a network.
So it was certain that it wouldn´ t get boring…
Discovery
Finding fish in the sea of opportunities
Our goal was not only to improve the product for exisiting customers, but also to offer new features that would adress challenges in selling or buying fashion. It was clear that for that we had to create a product strategy to be able to grow the product in the future.
To build up the basis for that we started a Discovery phase with these goals in mind:
Get a better understanding of…
the fashion industry in general
the competitive landscape of our market
the challenges of people selling and buying fashion on a daily basis
our customers´ challenges
Identifying possible additional opportunities for our…
market
business model
product
I approached the challenge from different angles:
Interviews
Recruited and interviewed distributors, sellers and buyers in the B2B fashion industry to identify pain points when buying or selling fashion
Competitive Analysis
Analyzed competitors to identify business and product opportunities within our market
User Testings
Conducted user testing sessions and interviews with customers and new hires to gather feedback on improving the existing product
UX Audits
Audited our existing product experience to identify possible usability issues and other fields for improvement
Data Analysis
Analyzed tracking data to learn more about how customers use our product and where they struggle to fulfill their tasks
I analyzed our research and formed our insights into hypotheses. We then clustered and prioritized these hypotheses in our multi-disciplinary team weighing and ranking them - always in mind the balance between user and business goals. We selected those, that we were most confident would have the biggest impact in the coming months:
Reduce the time to value
We believe customers spend too much time on tedious tasks before making their first sale, so we aim to reduce the time to value.
Better self-service
We believe that to grow we have to reduce our manual processes which is why we need to enable better self-service within the product
Improve the buying experience
We believe that a great buying experience can increase sales dramatically which is why we need to improve the buying experience
From opportunities to ideas to action
Knowing where we wanted to go I started with finding out how we might get there. For that, I initially created opportunity maps to quickly generate options that served as a basis for discussion, prioritization and concepts.
Section of Opportunity Map
I analyzed user journeys to understand where we have potential to improve the journeys. From there on, I created multiple variations of user flows e.g. for onboarding, data syncing or selling and buying.
User Flow "Buying Journey"
With the feedback of the team on the flows I was able to iterate on wireframes quickly to make the vision for the product become more tangible. I decided to go into a rough design direction with certain key wireframes so we could communicate better and decide faster before going into a final UI design phase.
Wireframes