The Perspective #21

Author

Oddit Team
February 08, 2023

Welcome to the 21st edition of The Perspective by Oddit! 

Twice a month we send out actionable tips for creating brand-first and conversion-optimized customer experiences from the best brands in the world! 

In this edition đŸ—ž:

  • Brand-first breakdown with Flewd

  • 5 questions with Founder Doug van Spronsen

  • How to design your "How it works" section

  • New brands we discovered this month

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If you missed our last editions, you can read them here!

Brand-First Breakdown: Flewd

Since we're all 15x more stressed today, Flewd decided to actually do something about it!

They specialise in anti-stress bath soaks to refuel our bodies with the nutrients we need to destroy stress-caused anxiety, insomnia, and aches — Basically giving stress the middle finger!

The brand is also doing all they can to responsibly run the business, so none of us have to worry about what happens after the formula goes down the drain. Their soaks are biodegradable, non-toxic, totally vegan, recyclable and cruelty-free, giving that peace of mind whilst relaxing in the tub.

We're breaking down various parts of the Flewd website and offering a couple of tweaks to make it an even better user experience and conversion machine. Let's jump in!

Navigation

Suggestions To Test:

Suggestion 1: Always make sure your announcement bar is actionable! This will help push your visitors further down the sales funnel.

Suggestion 2: Ensure your navigation bar surfaces your important links first. Utilize a “Bath Soaks” dropdown instead of just a “Shop Now” link to give your users easy access to your bath soaks with minimal clicks.

Suggestion 3: Separate your “Take The Stress Quiz” CTA from the rest of the nav links and convert it into a button to act as one of your main action buttons to drive more conversions.

Suggestion 4: Reduce clutter and leverage simple icons to represent “Account”, similar to the “Cart” icon. Add a bounding circle to separate it from the background and to ensure it stands out.

Suggestion 5: The current sticky nav is transparent when scrolled, so utilize a solid background color to make sure your nav bar can be easily seen.

Suggestion 6: Update the announcement bar like we’ve done on desktop.

Suggestion 7: Mirror the changes applied on the desktop version to the mobile version. Increase the size of the menu icon and the “Cart” icon to make clicking on them easier.

Mobile Drawer

Suggestions To Test:

Suggestion 1: Your current menu drawer is confusing. Remove the “Stan Favorites” section to help give space to actions that drive conversions instead.

Suggestion 2: Surface a “Bath Soaks” dropdown and leave it open to give your users quick access to your products.

Suggestion 3: Surface secondary actions in a way that makes them feel less important than the product links. This could be done by ensuring your product links stand out more than your secondary actions.

Suggestion 4: Convert your “Stress Quiz” link into a primary action and surface this at the bottom of the menu. Add a secondary action to “Shop All Bath Soaks” to give users another pathway to shop.

Suggestion 5: Call-out your free shipping offer at the bottom to help customers shop stress-free.

Homepage Header

Suggestions To Test:

Suggestion 1: Redesign your overhead image header and pull it down to ensure your nav bar can be easily seen.

Suggestion 2: You already showed your sale offer on your announcement bar, so surface something about your brand instead. Test an alternative copy on your headline and subheadline that states your value proposition.

Suggestion 3: Add a primary CTA at the bottom of the section where it’s thumb-accessible. Ensure it’s centered and leverage the entire width of the CTA.

Suggestion 4: Layer your free shipping offer below to break down any purchase barriers.

How It Works

Suggestions To Test: 

Suggestion 1: Reformat this section and utilize a step-by-step layout with numbers as scroll stoppers to make this information more scannable.

Suggestion 2: Convert the “Learn More” CTA link into a full-width CTA that leads to “Shop All Bath Soaks” or whatever main action you want to push your user to take.

Short Reviews

Suggestions To Test:

Suggestion 1: Add a headline that calls out your reviews total. The volume of success you’ve had is just as compelling as what users are saying.

Suggestion 2: Avoid long-winded sections and move these reviews into a carousel. Make sure they are easy to scan by surfacing only short snippets.

Suggestion 3: Add carousel indicators to indicate this section is swipeable.

Stress-Free Transparency 

Suggestions To Test: 

Suggestion 1: Remove the image to save vertical space — it tells the user nothing.

Suggestion 2: Simplify the content and make it more scannable. Users will avoid reading long paragraphs. Move these traits into rows of 2 and use icons that are relevant to the copy to give visual cues.

Suggestion 3: Add a CTA below and communicate to your users where they will be navigated to once they click on the CTA.

If you want loads of fresh insights like this for your site, check out our Quick Win 10-Pack and Full Reports!

Founders Five 🖐

Founder: Doug is an entrepreneur and a product thinker who is obsessed with figuring out how the world works.

In 2013, Doug co-founded Versett, one of the top digital strategy firms in North America. Versett is best known for their strategy work, user-experience design and engineering â€” and in the past year, the firm has worked extensively with clients like American Express, TD Bank, and Getty Images across a variety of global projects.

Each month, millions of people use the platforms, apps and tools they have built!

Doug also invests in early stage companies through Versett Ventures and sits on the boards of Connect First and True North Water.

Oddit: Over the past decade, you’ve built Versett from a team of 4 into 400. Growing a team is hard, and we can imagine fostering culture at scale is even harder. What do you feel has been your best cheat code when it comes to scaling culture remotely across 3 continents?

Doug: It’s something we are constantly evolving and tinkering with. Brene Brown has this quote that goes something like “clarity is kindness”. We try to live out that as a default, even when it’s uncomfortable or challenging. From a first principles perspective, we look to build a culture that is simultaneously both more productive and more humane. That's a lofty and hard goal that is never finished. Our commitment to building a thriving team is sincere — though imperfect — and we’re continually learning and pushing ourselves to do better.

Tactically, I have found that writing memos is an important habit. We use them to address important topics, ideas or changes and dialogue with the team. Everyone has access to an open archive of all of the memo’s from the past 10 years which paints a good picture of where we have been and where we are going.

Oddit: You’ve always been an early adopter — what new app or tool are you using right now that you can’t live without?

Doug: Two things come to mind:

With GPT-4 coming out in a few months we are going to see a Cambrian explosion of interesting tools and applications using LLM. Metaphor.systems is one of the interesting ones I am tracking. They are essentially looking replace Google Search with LLM-based queries. The results are surprising and interesting, and it’s just getting started, you can play with it live now if you sign in via Discord.

I am also a power user of Readwise â€” you can automatically sync passages from books and your Kindle. They just released a “reader” platform that reminds me of the old Google Reader days. It’s better than Instapaper and Pocket and they are building some cool features like a GPT-3 powered summary tool. I wrote a bit about how I use it as part of a “learning OS” here.

Oddit: Word on the street is you’re also fairly well-read — if you were to tell an entrepreneur that’s just hired his or her 20th employee one book to read, what is it?

Doug: It’s such a contextual question. The timing of a book can matter more than the book itself. But let’s just say he / she is part of a high growth company and wants to learn. My first recommendation would be to start with one of my favourite pieces of writings. It’s not a book, but it delivers a punch — Peter Kaufman on “The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking” which you can read in about 10 minutes here. Don’t mind the crappy website, it’s worth your while.

I think in terms of books, probably 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer. It sounds cheesy but it’s a masterclass in strategy. I think it’s helpful because it helps contextualize what really works. Generally I like to choose things with a good base rate. The average of how others do is the mostly likely indicator of my future performance. I want to get into situations where the base rate is attractive and this book explains what is attractive.

Oh and I always recommend the essay Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson if you haven’t read it since grade school.

Oddit: We know you’ve been busy growing the company through strategic acquisitions recently. How do you identify potential fits and what’s the most important thing you look for outside of strong financials?

Doug: First and foremost it’s culture. Do we want to work with these people? Do they want to work with us? Once that box is checked, we look to understand what their “secret” is. All great businesses have a secret — some means of creating durable, differentiated outcomes from the competition. We want to understand what they believe that is for their company and how it can be multiplied if we work together.

Oddit: A lot of our readers are looking at the next year with a lot of uncertainty. Any frameworks or tools they can look to when navigating this complexity?

Doug: The most important thing is to focus on a single objective which I have narrowed down to — “Accelerate what I can control”. That means avoiding things that you can’t control (the economy, politics, SBF, your customers) and accelerating what you can control (team, culture, unit economics, capital allocation). Recognize that everything is a cycle, and if you can keep your strategy intact you can ride through any complexity and be better for it.

Copy this "How it works" section for your site!

Classifieds 🔎

✅ The first part of our Product Page Guide is finally live! 

🤘 If your site has multiple collections pages read this ASAP

⭐️ 9 emerging DTC brands to watch this year

🔵 New brands we discovered this month: Hedoine, Rbel Bee, Oishii, and Ruani

Want your own brand-first breakdown? đŸš¨

Check out our full reports — Or even start with a Quick Win 10-Pack!

 If you don’t find any value you’ll get all your $$ back. No questions asked.

The Perspective is written by Shaun Brandt, Taylor Davies, and Thomas Schreiber

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