Plants & Roses, the eco-flower shop of the future (Part II)
Click here to read the first part of the article
The solution: give a second life to your flowers!
What does this slogan mean? We wanted to close the flower life cycle promoting the circle economy. The most usual behaviour of the user or the florist was throwing away the flowers once they become withered. However, we wanted to offer a new service to help the user not to waste the flowers when they are not at their best.
The service could be defined like a flower preservation assistance. With the new service people would bring their withered flowers to the store and we would dry them. Then, we could sell the flowers to the same customer for a small price (they would only pay the labour and materials), we could sell them in our store to other clients, we could use them in our workshops (we will speak later about the workshops) or we could also use the flowers for compost in our plant nursery.
Therefore, we would give another use to the flowers, we wouldn’t produce any waste and would make some profit. But, what would the user get? Why would they bring the flowers to our shop if they don’t have any benefit (apart from the ecological satisfaction)?
Digital card: get discounts and benefits
In order to compensate the customer that makes the effort of bringing their flowers to our shop we have created a digital card where the shopper can accumulate points and get discounts.
The card works like a loyalty card, but on your mobile, like the boarding pass of your next flight or your digital debit card. So, whenever a customer brings their withered flowers, something that they would bin, the customer will receive points to redeem for other products or services of the store.
The user could download the card from the website that we will build for the project (we will speak about this during the prototype phase) or clicking on a link that we will send by SMS or email.
The aim of this system was to give a new life to flowers that were supposed to become rubbish, compensate the customer with discounts and also make sure that the same customer will come back to the shop since they would spend less than in any other flower shop.
Furthermore, we were adapting the services of the business to the new technologies as the client demanded and promoting the circular economy through the new services.
But, what if the customer could get more benefits from our store? What if we could satisfy more needs and keep saving flower lives?
Happy Hour and Workshops: save money and learn!
During the previous stage we also realised that there were some potential customers that wouldn’t buy flowers because of the high prices of the product. And some of them would buy them only from time to time.
Furthermore, we observed that florists bin all the flowers that they weren’t able to sell. So we decided to create a happy hour for the flower shop in order to sell all those flowers that were becoming old at a lower price and save them from the rubbish.
In this way, flower lovers with low incomes could also purchase flowers without spending a big percentage of their salaries.
Additionally, while analysing the questionnaires we also noticed that users didn’t know much about flowers and they were willing to learn. So, we decided to create different workshops for all those customers interested in the floral world.
The list of workshop topics would be quite varied, but for now we would like to teach people how they could dry their flowers, so we could use the withered flowers people bring to shop or the old flowers we weren’t able to sell.
Finally, every time a customer buys during the happy hour and participates at any workshop, they will keep earning points for their loyalty card as they are contributing to the ecological cause.
Ecology, digital cards, happy hour, workshops… This is how Plants & Roses was born!
The physical store
In order to adapt all the new ideas to the shop we needed to redesign the physical space. We had to include an area for the workshops, the window display (escaparate in Spanish), the back of the shop (trastienda) where to dry the flowers, the counter, a little warehouse (almacén), an area where to build the bunches (preparación de ramos)… So we made the following shop plan:
Business Model and Value Propositions
Our business model proposition was very simple and beneficial for everybody: the user/costumer, our client and the flowers.
Firstly, we would like to offer discounts to the customer for bringing those flowers that were supposed to go to the trash can. So, with this system we give a second life to the flowers, our customers get points to redeem for other products at a lower prices and we sell more flowers as our clients would visit the shop more often.
Secondly, we would offer complementary services like the happy hour or the workshops that will make the store stand out from the competitors and will keep promoting the environmental consciousness.
We organised those ideas in two different tables.
The first one (picture 5) is the business model canvas that we used to organised our strategy. On the Our Key Partners (asociaciones claves) would be the providers, wholesaler and a specialist in marketing; the Key Activities (actividades clave) of the company would be selling flowers, reusing withered flowers, teaching at workshops and the local delivery; the Key Resources (recursos clave) would be the physical shop, the web, the flowers, a bicycle, etc and the Value Propositions (valor añadido) would include the circular economy, the happy hour, the workshops and the digital card among others.
On the customer side we considered the telephone, email and the physical presence the ways to establish the customer relationships (relación con clientes); the physical store and the online shop would be the channels (canales) and the main customers (clientes) would be flower lovers, people with low incomes with passion about flowers, ecofriendly people, events agencies, wedding planners, people interested to learn about flowers…
And finally, the cost structure (costes) would include the materials, the tools, the flowers, the web maintenance, the staff, etc. And the sale of flowers (physical or online) and the workshops would represent the revenue streams (ingresos y beneficios).
The second canva (picture 6) is the value proposition canva. This is more focused on the customer needs and pain points of their journey, which both have been mentioned before, and the relation they have with the value propositions, which have been commented in the business model.
Information Architecture and Wireframes
We had already developed the essence of the project and we just needed to materialise everything. We thought a simple E-commerce platform would be very ordinary as many flower shops have one and they don’t stand out from the others. So, we decided to create a site focused on showing the good environmental practices that the shop would carry out. It would be a one page website with an informational purpose which will aim to increase the brand awareness of the company.
In order to create the site we had to build a sitemap and a flowchart. With the sitemap we wanted to represent the site hierarchy. The whole website idea was very simple, without many elements because we didn’t want to confused the user.
There were three buttons on the menu: “my profile” (perfil), the physical store site (nuestra tienda) and the online shop (compra online). Furthermore, on top of the site there would be a mini banner promoting the happy hour.
The rest of the homepage would be organised in eight different sections that show various topics:
- Section 1: the slogan of the shop and a hashtag for the social media.
- Section 2: the explanation of our system.
- Section 3: how the digital card (tarjeta digital) works.
- Section 4: what is the happy hour.
- Section 5: our different workshops.
- Section 6: local flowers and eco-delivery.
- Section 7: used of biodegradable materials.
- Section 8: pictures of our store.
Then, we built a flowchart to explain how a user could create their profile and get the digital card. The interactions are quite simple: the user only has to register and once they reach their profile site they have to apply for their card.
By then, we knew how to organise properly the elements of the website, how they will connect among each other and how the would interact with the user. The next step would be transform all that date into wireframes:
We had everything we needed, so we started to create our prototype.
The Prototype
This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages (by the Interaction Design Foundation).
As I said before, we decided to create a one page website to show the ecological services of the company. We wanted to keep it simple and we made three buttons for the main(“our store”, “online shop” and “my profile”) to make the customer life easier, so they wouldn’t get lost among too many options.
Then, we divided the rest of the services in different sections that would be included in the main site. For the prototype we built the homepage, the “my profile” area and the digital card.
The following video contains the design of our website and the interactions with the different elements:
Conclusion
On one hand, I consider the Design Thinking a very useful method to provide a lot of ideas based on a sustained investigation. However, it can be a bit frustrating at the beginning because during the research phase you can’t develop the ideas that are coming to your mind.
It is also a good method to prioritize ideas and make you focus on the most important thing of a project.
On the other hand, I have to admit that the briefing of the project wasn’t very excited at the beginning. But, after working hard and investigating a lot, it came up a lot of interesting and creating ideas that were also very feasible for a real business.
For the future, I would like to keep developing some elements of the project, such as the website, the social media and the workshop topics.
Finally, it would also be interesting to work on a system to improve the digital communication between the wholesaler and the florist. Perhaps, that will be a new project…
I would like to thank Gracia E. and Arantxa Hortelano, who have been part of my team and have worked hard alongside me on this project during the last two weeks.
