I was lucky enough to join Patch on day 2 as the first employee in May 2016. It was also during these early days whilst working alongside its founder Freddie Blackett that I became aware of how design thinking methodology could help shape an early stage business.
When I joined we had 8 weeks to define, prototype and test a value proposition and hit a sales target of 35. It was a fun, thrilling and intense experience rolled into one, as Patch, and our professional lives hung in the balance.
We started by carrying out user research interviews to empathise and better understand people’s unique wants, needs and frustrations when it came to finding, buying and looking after plants for their space.
This was before the days of tools like Dovetail to synthesise your data so we painstakingly recorded each interview, typed them up verbatim in a Google sheet and used the highlighter tool to manually synthesise it.
This data, together with additional market research, helped define the problem that people living in cities struggled to find and buy the right plants for their space and keep them alive at home.
The next stage was to then prototype and test. Design sprints run by Forward Partners, Patch's early investor, helped inform and build Patch’s first website where customers could make an enquiry about plant suggestions for their space.
After receiving an enquiry we would then manually pull together a Google photo album of themed plant collections such as Japanese and Mediterranean-inspired suggestions, email it over, and hopefully make another sale to add to our weekly sales board.
Towards the end of each week, a plant shopping list was written and either myself or Freddie would drive to the nurseries in North London to buy and plant them out before they were delivered, 9/10 times in those early days by Freddie.
There were more design sprints, retrospectives and learnings and as the summer became the early autumn, we tweaked our current offering by adding an indoor plant offering.
It was this test that proved to be lighter fuel for Patch and signaled this was the direction to focus on in the next phase. Which is exactly what happened and fast forward to today and Patch has become one of the UK's biggest online retailers of indoor plants.
I'm happy I could play a role in Patch's early growth and grateful for the important lesson it taught me about how to practically apply the design learning process (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test).
The role and potential design thinking still has to play in our businesses and lives is remarkable and a key reason that has inspired my choice to pursure product design full-time.
DESIGN THINKING AT PATCH
I was lucky enough to join Patch on day 2 as the first employee in May 2016. It was also during these early days whilst working alongside its founder Freddie Blackett that I became aware of how design thinking methodology could help shape an early stage business.
When I joined we had 8 weeks to define, prototype and test a value proposition and hit a sales target of 35. It was a fun, thrilling and intense experience rolled into one, as Patch, and our professional lives hung in the balance.
We started by carrying out user research interviews to empathise and better understand people’s unique wants, needs and frustrations when it came to finding, buying and looking after plants for their space.
This was before the days of tools like Dovetail to synthesise your data so we painstakingly recorded each interview, typed them up verbatim in a Google sheet and used the highlighter tool to manually synthesise it.
This data, together with additional market research, helped define the problem that people living in cities struggled to find and buy the right plants for their space and keep them alive at home.
The next stage was to then prototype and test. Design sprints run by Forward Partners, Patch's early investor, helped inform and build Patch’s first website where customers could make an enquiry about plant suggestions for their space.
After receiving an enquiry we would then manually pull together a Google photo album of themed plant collections such as Japanese and Mediterranean-inspired suggestions, email it over, and hopefully make another sale to add to our weekly sales board.
Towards the end of each week, a plant shopping list was written and either myself or Freddie would drive to the nurseries in North London to buy and plant them out before they were delivered, 9/10 times in those early days by Freddie.
There were more design sprints, retrospectives and learnings and as the summer became the early autumn, we tweaked our current offering by adding an indoor plant offering.
It was this test that proved to be lighter fuel for Patch and signaled this was the direction to focus on in the next phase. Which is exactly what happened and fast forward to today and Patch has become one of the UK's biggest online retailers of indoor plants.
I'm happy I could play a role in Patch's early growth and grateful for the important lesson it taught me about how to practically apply the design learning process (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test).
The role and potential design thinking still has to play in our businesses and lives is remarkable and a key reason that has inspired my choice to pursure product design full-time.
DESIGN THINKING AT PATCH