Open Road Week 1: Getting Started with Galleria
As other Open Road teams hit the road, we began our journey at home working with Galleria Market. Having the extra week near Ann Arbor allowed us to center ourselves on the community that we currently call home. Although mask restrictions had been lifted in the community, the pandemic continued to be top of mind for us and for our first client, Jason Bang.
Jason is the owner of Galleria Market. After studying telecommunications at Michigan State University and receiving an MA in interpretation and translation, Jason moved to Korea where he worked for several years as a freelancer. Jason’s father started Galleria in 2010. After returning from Korea, Jason inherited the store and has been running it with his mom ever since. Galleria has since served the Ann Arbor community by providing access to AAPI brands that wouldn’t otherwise be found in the area.
Although we had previously met Jason virtually, our first physical meeting helped clarify the complexity of his business challenges. After going through the opportunities available to us, we partnered with Jason to pick out his most pressing yet realizable goals.
His love and knowledge of Galleria’s products combined with the difficulty of translating the value proposition of these products have placed an administrative burden on him. For example, although some customers might be familiar with seaweed, it’s hard to tease out which are used for sushi and which are meant for eating plainly. As AAPI foods gain notoriety, the local community is finding Galleria to be one of the more accessible stores to source ingredients and international snacks. Knowing that his goal was to expand his customer base and to find ways to improve the store generally, we knew we could help him scale and decrease his burden by augmenting his capacity with customer education materials.
We hit the road as a team by exploring other AAPI grocery stores to understand what worked for them and what we could bring back to Galleria. Additionally, we found a lot of information relating to Galleria’s business through market reports and online research. Although we were at first overwhelmed by all this data, we found that we were able to rely on the training of our Open Road Alumni (shoutout to Ritesh!) and the guidance of our Zell Lurie Advisor (thanks Chris!). We began with informal customer journey maps to understand how an individual walked through the store. Based on our observations and Jason’s, we created several hypothetical customer segments and walked through their behaviors to understand how they might interact with different aspects of the store.
As a team we decided that creating signage at various points of the store could not only create opportunities to educate customers on various products, but could be used to collect feedback and iterate on changes in the future. By mid-week, we were prototyping types of signage including the visual messaging, size, and feasibility as it relates to cost and ease of use. By the end of the week, we created digital, editable versions of our signs and created an implementation plan to walk through our rationale for the additional signage.
We were happy to kick off Open Road by working with Jason. Galleria provides an accessible way for the Ann Arbor community to find AAPI brands and we did our best to help his business during the week. Next time you’re looking for somewhere to shop and find something new, make sure you visit Galleria!
