Challenge
Stria was a service platform that connected artisans (or makers) in British Columbia, Canada to a larger global audience to build an authentic online identity through storytelling. The team’s mutual passion for genuine craft and raw storytelling led to an exploration of the relationships between artisans and their community. One of the biggest barriers these artisans faced was promoting their products and brand due to a lack of knowledge and/or lack of time and resources.
Goals
Primary Objective: Connect local artisans to new audiences to discover and share their work without diminishing their core values and roots as a maker.
We also aimed to challenge consumption habits amongst young professionals and culture seekers by providing the opportunity to redefine their relationships to products and their makers.
Process
Re-evaluate
Building off of the lessons learned in our initial prototype, we refined our concept to focus each maker’s story around three aspects: the people, the products and their stories. This led to a new process of consultation with each maker to understand their goals and then propose an offer to help them achieve it. This resulted in more flexible deliverables and services that were more attuned to each client’s interests and resources.
Design
To determine if a potential client would be a good fit for Stria’s services, I developed a new client model by reviewing which stories and maker relationships were the most compelling from our first iteration. By deconstructing the key characteristics of these stories and relationships I was able to reconstruct a new set of criteria for client selection that aligned to people, products and stories.
Another big part of our design process was exploring how to build a strong digital presence beyond film through immersive, interactive storytelling. My role in this process was to: build the story for each maker we interviewed; develop interactive content to highlight tools and techniques used to create their products; and organize the layout for each maker page on our website to interweave text, media and interactive content into one fluid narrative.
Launch
We successfully launched with four films featuring four diverse makers and already started the engagement process with two new potential clients. A website was created as the central hub of the platform and featured an interactive narrative about Crossed Heart Forge. Social media outreach (via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) were also strategically utilized leading up to the launch.
Impact
All deliverables were well received by both target audiences and the makers we featured, leading to greater awareness and interest in their craft and products. The films were crucial to this success and resulted in local and trade media including Design Milk, Verygoodlord, Art of Blacksmithing and Metal Workers, JOBO Visual Cinematography and Those Who Make.
Learning Outcomes
- Have a clear brand identity and goals. This sets and helps meet customer expectations of the promised product and/or service.
- Cultivate strong relationships. Improving web accessibility by utilizing social research and design
- Give equal attention to developing all touchpoints, channels and offerings. In the case of Stria, we invested too many resources into film and didn’t give enough time to flesh out other areas of our platform.
- Be flexible and adaptable. Every client, customer, and vendor is different and has different needs, desires and goals that your service should consider.
- Have a strong feedback loop. It is critical to measuring success and keeping the project aligned to its original goals. It also lays the groundwork for considering future phases, long term goals and any obstacles to achieving them.