Food Clubs
Food Clubs is a group buying platform for sustainable groceries. By buying in small, local groups ( 'clubs') direct with ethical wholesalers, Food Clubs radically alters the economics, cutting out the retailer margin, passing significant savings on to the customer. As Principal Product Designer and co-founder, I led a cross-functional team taking the idea from seed investment to launch.
The Problem
The idea of food buying clubs is not a new one. People have been buying direct from suppliers and wholesalers since the 70’s as a cheap way to get goods that are otherwise not affordable or available.
While the model is well established, the process by which it happens is still very much stuck in the 70’s. People typically place orders by telephone, via printed catalogue, or on fairly antiquated e-commerce stores.
Food Clubs aims to help that process, whilst normalise and popularise it as a way of grocery shopping.
Customer interview pain point card sort exercise
Product discovery
- Identify typical customer personas
- Understand and map existing processes
- Uncover customer motivators and pain points
With around 3,000 food buying clubs active around the country, the logcial start point was to speak to as many of these people as possible. We interviewed around 20 club participants face-to-face, along with many more phone conversations with people all over the country, and a survey that received over 100 responses.
It quickly became clear that there were two main roles to cater for - the organiser (highly motivated, typically the person that starts the club), and members (less motivated but appriciative passive participants).
Interviewees were characterised as almost exclusively women, and almost exclusively mothers, with a keen eye on social and ethical issues. Most had young families that they wanted to feed well, while the remainder were community-minded empty nesters.
The key motivations were abundently clear with everyone we spoke to - greatly reduced costs on products that were otherwise too expensive to afford or hard to find locally.
Two common themes soon emerged as the obvious pain points.
With no dedicated systems, collectively placing orders was difficult. The majority of clubs used complicated, home-spun spreadsheets drawn up and managed by the organiser. This placed a large time overhead and burden of responsibility on the organiser, which commonly led to churn.
Secondly, with no system for collecting payments, it usually fell to the club organiser to take financial resposibility for the order, and hope everyone coughed up. Social awkward situations amongst friends were common as organisers tended to need to make regular reminders to their friends and neighbours to pay their share.
Customer interview motivators and pains summary
Market tests
- Validate market demand
- Validate proposition and offering
- Validate audience, channels, messaging and creative
- Start building a user base for launch
Validating the market is vital for any new B2C product. As well as assessing market demand, it’s also a great moment to experiment with messaging, test the proposition and validate channels ahead of launch. Results of our market tests helped us prioritise features according to what resonated in the market.
We teamed up with product marketing agency Newton Bell to devise a market test strategy, recruit customer interview and test subjects, and build a pre-launch email marketing list.
Facebook proved to be our best performing channel, with messaging around financial benefits performing strongest. We saw excellent acquisition costs of around £1.20 per customer.
Live data prototypes
- Define, test and iterate features to address unique problems in group grocery buying
- Quickly build a usable system to allow us to deliver a 10,000 SKU product catalogue
With clear pain points to address (group ordering and payment collection), we set out to test some initial solutions. Usually, I'd first test with lo-fi clickable prototypes, but as we wanted to understand group behaviour and how they interact together, it was decided we could very quickly build a fully functional, but very simple, group buying platform.
We timeboxed ourselves to two weeks to get a system up and running. Working with just a single offshore engineer, we managed to build and test a basic system with 10 existing buying clubs.
We conducted usability and value proposition tests, both in-person and via remote user testing software such as Inspectlet and Lookback to observe and interrogate how groups of people placed their orders with our system, with each testing providing insight for us to learn and make continual improvements.
Basic but functional end-to-end live data prototype
High fidelity prototypes and beta testing
- Observe other team-based software onboarding
- Define features to allow clubs to form
- Start building clubs before service launch
The question of how people would cooperate to form and shop in clubs was the central question of the first 6 months of Food Clubs. As a new buying behaviour, we were keen to experiment with ways we could encourage the creation and growth of clubs while slotting into existing mental models defined by other popular team collaboration SaaS products.
Undertaking an onboarding teardown excerise looking at different approaches to a similar problem helped us define our first customer journey: club creation.
Exploration of team creation flows from existing products
Using Sketch and Invision to create high fidelity clickable prototypes, we defined and iterated on an onboarding experience that allowed users to quickly and frinctionlessly create their own food club and invite friends to join.
Sketch + Invision high fidelity prototype
Design system + MVP
- Define a product-wide visual language and brand
- Define a set of shared components to facilitate rapid iteration
- Launch public MVP
With a very short runway and a focus on validating the proposition of a very early-stage product, branding was never a priority for Food Clubs. However, speed of iteration, usability and visual consistency absolutely were.
Taking advantage of Abstract's shared libraries and design team collaboration tools, I defined a component-based design system that mimicked the structure of React components with a set of synced asset libraries that were constantly updated as the product matured.
Using this system meant we were able to quickly pull together new flows and features with only minimal design input, allowing us to focus on validating features rather than keeping UI consistent.
A selection of Sketch library componants
Abstract managed design system
Conclusion & results
- Launched the UK’s largest, cheapest sustainable supermarket, from a standing start within 3 months, beating Amazon, Ocardo and all major traditional supermarket retailers on price… from a shipping container in Brixton
- £25k sales per month within 3 months of launching
- 55% retention month on month
Within 6 months of putting the initial team together, we built and launched a completely custom group buying ecommerce system. After an initial beta phase that highlighted operational improvements that needed to be made to the physical delivery of products, we opened the doors to the public in mid-September 2018.
Within 3 months of launching, and with only modest marketing spend, we acquired over 557 paying customers, spending an average of £70 per shop, and with a 55% retention rate.
By November 2018 we hit a £300k run-rate off the back of a total £8k marketing spend.
Food Clubs continues to be developed and is in currently raising its next round.
Food Clubs landing page
Product page containing sector specific features