From Artisanal To Digital: MING Labs x OM Blends London — A Case Study
How Design Thinking and Lean Business help a traditional small business to succeed online
by Martina Maitan and Jian He, UX Designers at MING Labs
In the past, if you wanted to have a candle made, it required experience, quality materials, and extended manual labor. Nowadays, the exclusivity and the nature of a well-made candle seems like a distant scene. Fortunately, there are still passionate people who are striving to bring this art back to life, but of course, with multiple obstacles to overcome in order to succeed.
We have looked around for a challenging project and OM Blends London, a small artisan shop that produces candles using essential oils and sustainable materials, was a perfect example.
“I got tired of buying products of scarce quality/cost ratio. I’ve decided to invest and create one that satisfies the good quality market niche.” — Marta, OM Blends Owner
Like us, UX Designers at MING Labs, they have been seeking perfection in small details. So, the question now is: How do we apply Design Thinking and Lean Business methodologies and help them embrace Digital Transformation?
Learn About Your Clients — Identify The Problems
The first important step is to understand where your clients come from and what motivates them. We interviewed Marta and Oliver to learn more about their business and identified some of their main challenges:
High Price — OM Blends is struggling with justifying the reason why their candles are more expensive than the ones from big producers such as Bath & Body Works, Yankee Candles, Jo Malone, or Diptique.
Production Speed — Because of the carefully handcrafted work, the time to produce a candle is very high compared to other industry competitors. This is also a key distinctive factor, as the production is highly cared for.
Distribution Process — Currently the sales happen mostly within the circle of friends and family, making word of mouth their key marketing channel, though not entirely reliable.
First Steps Into Our Research Process
Once we identified the challenges and opportunities faced by OM Blends, we went further and conducted some user research. We interviewed 10 people from various backgrounds: yoga practitioners, moms, partners, shop owners… We collected a few interesting (and unexpected!) answers.
To start off, we looked into shops and spoke with shop owners to learn how products are displayed, and to understand the likes and dislikes of their consumers.
Insights From Field Research…
Scent — It has to be strong, persistent, and “natural”. It mustn’t smell too chemical (something like soap dish). We noticed that consumers tend to get lost in the description of the scent — too many ingredients, herbs, essences. Imagine how hard is it to describe the scent of “petitgrain”… What is it btw?
Value of the product — Customers are not willing to pay a large amount of money for a natural candle. Natural products are more expensive due to their process and manufacturing costs, but these elements are mostly hidden to the eyes of the end consumer.
Shop experience — Customers always prefer to try the products before the purchase. Taste differs for every individual, so it’s important for consumers to understand if they like the scent before purchasing. Customers might purchase a candle solely based on the packaging, and most of the time end up unsatisfied with the scent.
Being “artisanal is difficult”- Being a small local enterprise means being ready to fight huge brands with strong campaigns and of course, massive production. Small businesses have to consider other factors, such as spending arduous hours into crafting unique products and paying high shipping costs.
…And Desk Research
Customer interviews gave us insights into what is valuable for them, so we can better conduct desk research to compare brands by that value definition.
Who are OM Blends’ competitors? How are their businesses going? What are they offering? Do they sell other products other than candles?
We checked online sellers in the European territory, the market is quite oversaturated (which is the right word to say!) with natural products, essential oils, reclaimed containers, and recycled packaging. Other accessories like balsam, incense sticks, and aroma diffusers complete the supply.
OM Blends face a foreseeable difficult market penetration due to the big saturation in this range of products. Nowadays, there are large companies who allow their customers to take home the magic of a candle at a low cost while compromising on poor quality and harmful materials (mainly derived from petrol).
What To Do Now?
At the end of this whirling round of perfumes and candles, we concluded that we had only two options:
Option 1: Queue up along with other brands and be part of the long list of sellers 🙁.
Option 2: Try to squeeze our brain and figure out what’s the missing link in this overloaded market that will enable OM Blends to stand out 🏆.
Personas And Scenarios
Naturally, we couldn’t go for option 1, so we moved on to try to understand who would be the potential customers. Defining our personas will help guide us through crafting our user journeys, problem statements, and hypothesis.
We developed 3 personas, that will help us focus our solutions — a woman who knows exactly what she wants (a candle-veteran) (C ) and a guy who needs to buy a special gift (C ). We wanted to think also from a shop owner’s perspective (B), helping us shape new user journeys where the business of OM Blends can be extended to wholesalers and not only to final customers.
Challenges
Out of this first part of the research, we identified 3 main key challenges:
- How do we promote the value of natural handmade products?
- How do we help customers choose products that fit their needs and expectations?
- How do we expand OM Blends’ business outside of the UK, considering high-cost shipping fees, etc.?
Opportunities Mapping
Many ideas, right? But of course we cannot work on all of them, we are designers 🧚, not magicians 🧙♂️.
Most of these ideas can only be implemented by OM Blends with the help of a substantial team. Still, we proposed that we would focus on something that we believe is essential for their business (or any business) to jump into the arena.
Want to know more? The second part of this article focuses on crafted design solutions. Stay tuned and keep an eye on our page to not miss the next piece.
Martina Maitan and Jian He are UX Designers 🧚 at MING Labs.
MING Labs is a leading digital business builder located in Berlin, Munich, New York City, Shanghai and Singapore. We guide clients in designing their businesses for the future, ensuring they are leaders in the field of innovation.
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