Cosmetic creation made easy
Role
Producer
Design Direction
Services
Naming
Branding
Product Strategy
Product Design
UX Strategy
Positioning & Messaging
Product Marketing
Team
Senior Designers x 3
Content Strategist
Product Manager x 2
CTO
CEO
Date
2020-Current
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Introduction
Product creation in the formulation industry (cosmetics, drinks, food, personal care, etc) is very complicated. Highly technical requirements, coupled with a strict regulatory environment makes this space difficult for new and emerging brands to penetrate.
Our client team saw an opportunity to disrupt the space by providing new and emerging brands with a guided online platform that easily turns their product ideas into a formulated and finished product. The opportunity for disruption was clear, how the product would behave, less so.
Enter startup Goldn; product creation made easy. My role as director covered full go to market, team, and program management; naming, branding, product strategy, UX strategy, product design, marketing design, positioning and messaging development.
The go-to-market strategy I developed was a phased rollout ultimately aimed at creating a B2B marketplace (think B2B Upwork for formulation-driven businesses).
Phase 1 / Brand focus
Provide product creation guidance, collaboration, and organization. Allow brands to partner with vendors with sharable project briefs.
Phase 2 / Vendor focus
Use sharable project briefs to pull vendors into the platform to build out the marketplace. Capture vendor details for their own searchable brand pages.
Phase 3 / Marketplace scale
Scale out the marketplace with improved tool sets on the brand and vendor sides. Build out marketplace size with continuous platform improvements.
Product activation assets.
Brand and product guidelines.
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Didn’t make the cut
Brand directions that didn’t make it. The name ‘Goldn’ came from cockney-rhyming rap battle in a creative workshop.
gold·en | \ ˈgōl-dən \
1: Certainty, confidence, all-right, fine.
- ‘I’m worried we botched the formulation’
- ‘Nahh, bruv, don’t worry. You’re golden mate!’
Product & UX Strategy
To meet the objectives of phase 1; provide new and emerging formulation brands with a means of easy product creation, we focused on the following:
Guidance: Step-by-step guidance through an unfamiliar and difficult product creation process, with a guided and staged process [think a fun turbo-tax].
Collaboration: A space for teams to collaborate around formulation creation. Unknown processes and questions would inevitably lead to communication and discussion
Organization: The platform needed to organize and direct company and team efforts.
Matchmaking: For meaningful partnerships to be formed between brands and potential vendors, there needed to be information exchange that was sufficient, consistent and coherent.
Strategic Documentation
Product documentation following a design-thinking + agile process. Grows and captures consensus as the team moves through the product design process. Provides clarity and keeps everyone honest.
Protecting innovation
Design innovation is killed by poorly run and unproductive design reviews. My role included educating team on good design processes and protecting the design team’s space to innovate.
User flows
Multiple iterations, drafts and sketches with the team created alignment and clarity on product structure and flow.
Wireframe & concept development
Based on preceding UX and product strategies, and flows, the team built out multiple viable design approaches. The concepts below were taken forward and used in the final product.
UI & System Development
Once go-to-market, UX and product market strategy were clarified, work started on building out UI and UI System.
