Kick Start: Grand designs

• Josh Mehlman
• 2 April 2009
• Page 1 of 3 : single page

Designing a business

What was the idea behind the online store?

Janet Leach: I’d come pretty close on a couple of occasions to opening my own physical store but it didn’t fit with my family, because I have young children, and I didn’t think it was the retail model of the future. So I did a lot of research, mostly just staying up late between pregnancies, and seeing who the competitors were and making notes on what I could do better.

I’ve had training in design and communications and I have a fairly strong sense of style and what I like.

Josh: What are you trying to achieve next?

Janet: My main question is, how can I increase growth fairly quickly, increase traffic and convert sales? I want sustainable sales throughout the year, not just at Christmas time, so I need to start planting the seed in people’s minds that there’s a dependable mainstay that’s just a click away.

Marketing yourself

What have you done to attract new customers to the site?

Janet: I started with a local PR firm targeting the print media locally and then nationally for five months. It has been really good for brand recognition and brand identity. By that stage, we had enough website data to start on search engine optimisation, and we have just completed our first month of that with a local company. I have done sponsorships for women’s business groups and men’s sporting groups because I’m pitching to a unisex audience. I’ve also done some really cheap advertising in local school newsletters. I think that’s also important, to not lose sight of those immediately around you.

Mike Morrison: Janet, one thing that comes through strongly is your sense of style; it’s very much part of your expertise and the way you present things. My sense is that at the same time as you are trying to get publicity for the website, you should be publicising yourself. There is such a strong sense of yourself through this site. You have got a really good story which is particularly relevant to women in the workplace, especially working mums in the workplace. I think your story could be written in such a way that it continues to give you profile and therefore the site gets profile as well.

To me your site feels more female than it does male. You might have some genderneutral products there, but your sense of design seems to have a really feminine appeal. I think that naturally leads you into narrowing your PR strategy and arguably your web strategy.

This is where you might have to make a little bit of a sacrifice. I know that you want traffic, but it needs to be valuable traffic and, to me, that valuable traffic is going to be female, it’s going to be discretionary income and people such as working mums who also find your story interesting.

Michael Fox: I like the name Artery. It has the potential to be a brand name like Apple, which has so much depth to it. ‘Apple’ says the brand is innovative, with Isaac Newton sitting under the tree and the apple falling on his head; it says that the brand is fresh and crisp. I think you can do something similar with Artery, making those associations, which you’ve started doing with your Pulse newsletter.

Meeting a need

Who’s the target market for the site?

Janet: The market I set up for was very Generation X, 29–44 age group, but I could broaden that slightly.

Mike: As a bitter and twisted 44-year-old Gen Xer, we are meant to be the most time poor and upset generation on earth, so anything you can do to make our lives a little bit more convenient and simpler will get a big tick. There is nothing worse than trying to get your 4WD into a car park with two kids screaming; [better to know] that you can go online to arterystore. com to get a little gift for your mum sent to Melbourne.

Jonathan Crossfield: When someone has come to this web page, it should be very, very clear to them within the first 10 seconds what it is for, how it’s going to solve a problem for them. Once you have established the story of your target audience, you need to explain to them how you are going to be the next step in that story. So, when they come to your site, the top half of the home page, the bit that’s going to appear in the browser, should answer that need straight away.

For example, it wasn’t clear what range of products you had because the search bar that would help me to find things was three-quarters of the way down the page and I had to scroll to find it. In most successful websites, that’s right at the top of the page.

Janet: How do you get that much detail without overcomplicating your homepage?

Jonathan: I think the answer is in the copy on your homepage, which needs to say that you cover a wide range, but that you’ve chosen specific products because they’re green or well designed, or whatever the reasons are.

Because they might come to the site from Google, a newsletter or a word-of-mouth recommendation, a hundred different ways, they need to have the same understanding of what they can expect to find if they go deeper into the site. If people are going online searching for Mum’s present to send to Melbourne, you’re one of 3000 entries that came up in Google, so if you don’t grab them straight away, they’ll click back and look at the next site. You need a headline and two lines of copy that say, this is our vision, these are the products that we focus on.

Mike: You’re on your way to building a brand but you actually don’t have one yet. Brands are either verbs, like Google, or they are wonderful adjectives; at the moment you have a noun, a label, a name. If your niche is the gift-giving site that gets me out of jail every time I run into a birthday, then you need to make it clear that’s what Arterystore does for me. If it’s a place where I love to go to examine style and new things that I can’t get anywhere else, its uniqueness could become part of what it does for me.

One of the problems online retailers run into is they think in terms of it being a product when they are in fact providing a service. So get into a mentality of always looking at the site in terms of what is this going to do for somebody?

Standing out

How can Janet communicate what’s unique about her site?

Michael: The design looks good but when I first went to the site, I had trouble placing it in the market and trying to differentiate your site from other sites. As well as Mike and Jonathan’s ideas, I think you could also work on your tag line, expand on that slightly to make sure it demonstrates how you differentiate yourself in the market.