The Nebulab Newsletter - Issue #19

Hello, and happy Wednesday!

This is issue no. 19 of the Nebulab newsletter, your favorite bi-weekly reflection about retail, DTC, and eCommerce technology.

It's time to get weird.

If we asked you to design the perfect purchase flow on the back of a napkin, you would probably—with varying levels of artistic dexterity—draw a landing page with a lifestyle photography hero, which then leads to a product listing page with facet filtering, which then leads to a product detail page with a clever description, stellar reviews, beautiful images and pricing, which then leads to a perfectly optimized one-page checkout flow.

This is the canon of e-commerce design. It's perfect. And it's the same. For every. Single. Brand.

When an industry is young, best practices are nonexistent, and variance is high. As the industry matures and develops a shared taste, best practices are established, and variance plummets. That's how we got Baymard—or, as we lovingly call it, the Big Book of eCommerce No-Nos.

“So what?” you might ask. “More best practices mean fewer barriers to entry, and less variance means less friction for the consumer.”

That is true for the average brand and the average consumer. The easier you make it to shop with you, the more customers will do it.

And yet, certain brands don’t offer convenience. They don’t really care about refining their product discovery flow or optimizing their post-purchase emails or even—cover your eyes!—reducing the number of steps on their checkout. Instead, they provide quirkiness, exploration, and exclusivity. And customers absolutely love them.

Informally, we refer to these as experiential brands, in contrast with the more traditional transactional brands. With an experiential brand, you’re not spending money for a product—you're spending money for cultural capital. The product itself doesn’t really matter. What matters is the experience of discovering the product, buying it, owning it, and benefitting from the social status this experience bestows upon you.

There is an interesting parallel here with the concept of finite and infinite games. Transactional brands are finite games: you're playing to win a prize. Experiential brands, on the other hand, are infinite games: you're playing for the joy of continuing to play.

As a result of this dynamic, experiential brands show some attractive traits, such as being able to transcend "value for money" considerations and command organic customer loyalty.

So, how does that connect to design? Well, experiential brands thrive on breaking the rules. The weirder their digital properties, the more valuable the experience of engaging with and buying from the brand. They throw away the best practices in favor of inside jokes, easter eggs, and kitsch visuals. They know how to do things right, and they intentionally go the other way to create a deeper connection with their customers.

Now, let's be clear about something: it would be madness to suggest that all brands should be fully experiential. It's complicated, unreliable, and not always desirable. In fact, most brands will fall somewhere across the transactional-experiential spectrum, with only a few pure-play outliers; think the whole dropshipping category on the transactional side, think brands like MSCHF on the experiential side.

What we do believe is that many brands that rely on a primarily transactional approach, and only design with the average consumer in mind, are missing out on the opportunity to capitalize on weirdness. And in a saturated market, weirdness is one more weapon you can use to stand out from the crowd, attract new customers, and create a community of raving fans.

So, as much as we love our Baymard subscription, here's our plea. The next time you're sitting down with your design team to work on something, pause for a second and ask yourself, "Shall we get weird?"

Today, we’re featuring two opposite perspectives on the form vs. function discussion in eCommerce design and an inspiring talk about experiential retail design.

Dork Mode: An Antidote to the Sea of Sameness. An oldie but a goodie from our friends at Future Commerce. Having a Dork Mode for highly loyal customers who want a more experiential brand experience is a fascinating concept. However, we’d also argue that dorkiness can often be a strong driver of customer acquisition rather than an “acquired taste” for loyal customers.

🎧 Unlocking the Power of ‘Mind Building’ for Experience Design. For us, this was one of those talks that get your heart racing with excitement. Ari is known for really pushing the boundaries of experiential retail. This talk is a much-needed shot of inspiration (and science!) for anyone looking to understand how human beings experience consumption and how brand equity is built.

Motherf***ing Website. On the other end of the spectrum, Filippo Conforti from Commerce Layer makes the case for why form should always follow function in eCommerce design. Filippo comes from a technical background, so take this piece with a grain of salt, but do keep it in mind when you need to balance dorkiness and usability as part of your digital strategy.

Delivering digital design at scale for an e-commerce brand comes with a unique set of challenges and requires a collaboration process much different from what most brands and agencies are used to.

In this blog post, our very own Michela Frecchiami, Digital Product Designer here at Nebulab, provides an overview of our design process, including some of the mistakes we've made on our journey from a more traditional, design-centric approach to a much more fluid, highly collaborative workflow.

If you lead digital product, design, or development at an e-commerce/DTC brand, take a look! You might just find some gems in there.

When we publicly launched Sprout, our product gifting app, we set a pretty ambitious goal for our marketing team: we wanted to have a full-blown brand identity and marketing website up and running in two weeks.

We didn't have a particular reason for the two-week deadline. It just felt like it would be an exciting challenge and would force us to experiment with new tools and ways of collaborating.

Exactly two weeks later, we had a brand and a website. (Which means we could have done it in one week, but still!)

Davide Di Stefano, our Head of Design, recently wrote an article on our blog on how we did it. It has some pretty interesting tips for any marketing or design team working under tight deadlines, so go check it out!

That’s it for today!

If you have any questions, comments, or delightfully designed storefronts, share the dorkiness with us at [email protected].

See you in two weeks! 👋

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