Making it merrier
Methods, skills, and techniques applied:
Design thinking
Lean startup
Persona creation & journey mapping
UX design
Agile product development
Product launch
Being Santa is hard.
It’s a part-time job for millions of people every year. It also pushes our logistics infrastructure to the limit and creates a make-or-break moment for retailers. Sleigh alleviates those burdens to make the holiday season merrier for as many people as possible.
We started Sleigh after experiencing the problem and creating a solution firsthand. Every year, Sleigh’s co-founder (and my sister), Colleen, would ship all of her gifts to my house for hiding. I would unbox everything, send her delivery updates, and she would come over and wrap everything before the big day. We thought other people could use this service and decided to build a business around it.
Sleigh provides temporary storage space, a personalized gift inventory, and custom gift wrapping for all of your holiday purchases through a network of convenient Sleigh locations. We had 79% revenue growth in our second season and 95% retention in our third season.
This is how we got there ...
Empathize
The 2019 pilot shop was our main source of empathy for future product development. We are bootstrapped and lean, so we had to start small to validate the concept, establish a process, and learn from real customers. We used feedback from social media and local media appearances to learn if our initial value proposition was resonating. Having a physical shop allowed us to hear real-time, on-site qualitative feedback from our customers. We also collected post-season survey responses to understand specifically which features of the service customers valued and what kept non-customers from buying. Tracking all orders, deliveries, and inventories manually in our pilot season helped us precisely understand the operational challenges of execution. All of this experience and learning was critical to Sleigh’s next stage, building a digital inventory product.
Define
From those learnings, we were able to begin to shape a vision for how we would scale Sleigh. This initial vision was produced into a short video animation and shared with potential partners throughout 2020 before our MVP build. The feedback led us to consider both home-based and commercial operators to expand the business. We were able to get clear on our target customers and partners and the pain points we needed to solve with our product.
Ideate
Once we defined how we wanted to grow and with whom, we were able to think creatively about what our product could actually do. We determined our main product users: Believers (customers), Elves (operators), and admins. We talked about each of their unique ambitions for the holiday season, their reasons for using Sleigh, and their journeys inside and outside of our digital product. We may have been the only company in 2020 to write user stories for Elves.
Prototype
With our user stories defined, we were able to write detailed product requirements and design actionable wireframes that our developers could begin to build from immediately. All of the experience, insights, and planning prior to this phase allowed the team to build the Sleigh Gift Inventory App in just seven weeks!
Test
Nothing like testing your first product release with real customers and contractors. We launched the Sleigh Gift Inventory App for our 2020 season with our central Sleigh retail location and at-home Elves. We were able to log deliveries in a fraction of the time, which allowed us to store more gifts for more customers in more locations. As a result, we achieved 79% revenue growth and 50% customer base growth in our second season. And all of those new users became a source of feedback and learning for future product iterations and growth.