Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

Few weeks ago I was having an informal chat on online strategy with the owner of Kidbean.com, which is a specialty etailer for organic baby clothes.  The site already pulls in thousands of monthly visitors and Melissa (the owner) was not looking for a redesign so we brainstormed on ideas she could implement herself, right now.

As Melissa told me the story of KidBean I got really excited because this completely changed my opinion about the company.  Anyone can set up an online store, few have an authentic story.  A site visitor could visit “About Us” to hear snippets of her story but we wondered if we could summarize it (elevator pitch style) and place it right on the homepage for everyone to see.  The other nugget to jump out was that kidbean.com doesn’t carry brands that fail their fair labor, environmental, veganism, and safety standards.  This was a huge ‘aha’ moment because it completely changes the context of kidbean.com.  It’s no longer just a store where people add products to a cart but rather a filtering system that hand picks products for a very specific customer profile (Vegans).  Kidbean.com helps parents save time by performing the filter function for them.  This adds a premium value to the store but a first time visitor has to dig to discover this differentiator.  We decided to include this page link (in bold) as part of the homepage elevator pitch content.  10 minutes after our call Melissa had implemented the changes and the test was officially live.  In essence, all she did was add a snippet of text to the homepage.  One month later I inquired about results and received this email:

PS: I have the store owner’s permission to reproduce this email.