Guava Family
2016-PRESENT
BACKGROUND
An e-commerce company making travel sleep easier and safer for parents and their little ones. With over 60% of young parents having already taken a trip overseas with their kids, the current generation is flying more than any other. Guava Family's core product, the Lotus Travel Crib, is a portable sleep area that helps kids have a great night sleep no matter the destination.
MY ROLE
I joined the team, which is based out of Solana Beach, as Creative Director in early 2016 to refine the brand and product experiences. The brand's exponential growth meant there was a good amount of design and technical debt that had to be addressed first. After creating some headway on that work, we stepped back to analyize our customers, identify our design strategy and find more nimble execution opportunities.
BRANDING
Showing parents a glimpse of a life lived together.
From our research, we found parents already were resonating with the current brand. So, instead of a larger redesign, we worked to find ways of elevating every touchpoint the brand existed from physical (product and packaging) to digital (web, email, etc). Along the way, we teamed up with the talented creatives at Capture Film Co for new photography.
WEB DESIGN
Crafting the shopping experience.
With the website being Guava's storefront, it's been a huge focus for our team. Uncovering gaps in the experience of our shoppers and addressing them with thoughtful design has shown a huge return in better conversion rate, less visits needed per purchase and lower customer service volume. After a year and a half of iteration on an older custom theme, we launched late last year with a ground-up redesign that took into account all that we had learned.
TESTING
Creating smarter feedback loops.
In the past, I'd seen the power of customer research on app or software design, but it has been incredibly helpful for Guava when applied to the e-commerce shopping experience. With so many motivations and anxieties of our shoppers to uncover, building easy-to-maintain feedback loops has been great for the team. This feedback takes the shape of more integrated analytic tools, constant scroll and click mapping, A/B testing pages and sections, post and pre-purchase surveys, and many other testing methods.
PRODUCT DESIGN
Launching a new version of the core product.
Much like SASS companies, the team at Guava was always doing small rolling updates to the core product line, but they had yet to launch a new version. Once the new brand and website work had been launched, we started work on creating a vision for "Lotus 2". I helped with a new graphic package, setup & packing illustrations, refined instruction manual packet, new top fabric selection and many other refinements. The new version launched to happy parents in 2017.
NEXT PROJECT
Want to See More Work?
Next up, an app design experience from the ground up. Created while I was Head of Design at a venture-funded, smart-home startup called Notion. Enjoy!
