B2B Wholesale Marketplace SaaS
BORN streamlines workflows for professional brands and buyers working in fashion, wellness, home, and food categories. I led product vision, design and innovation (a team of 10), and grew the business from concept to $2M+ ARR, serving 50k+ brands, 250k+ professional buyers, and 750k+ products per year.
“Everyone is a bit uncomfortable with digital - brands and sellers are still learning to navigate platforms and use the functionality.”
- VP Marketing, Informa Markets
Designing a frictionless buying experience
The Product is the Hero
In our discussions with buyers, we noticed that existing B2B platforms were built without much consideration for the buyer experience - organized around brand "silos" and focused solely on order management. BORN was designed to put products first - giving buyers transversal access to products across all brands, and dramatically improving the product discovery process.
Mobile-First Experience
B2B buyers are largely resistant to adopting new tools and technology. We needed to show our value by fitting into their existing workflows as seamlessly as possible - by building a digital mobile companion for their day-to-day work activities. We designed apps for iOS, Android and mobile Web that conveniently put product discovery, wishlists and order management in the buyer's pocket.
A Magic Moment - Moving Wishlists to Draft Orders
While moving saved products to a checkout basket is a relatively straight ahead action in B2C e-commerce, achieving the same action in B2B is a much more complicated. Order details can vary greatly from one buyer's draft order to the next due to geography, special discounts, shipping requirements, etc. I worked closely with our partners at SAP to reduce front-end UX complexity and create a "magic" moment where a buyer's multi-brand wishlist automatically generates individual draft orders for each brand.
Product launch as-a-service
Great Stories Sell Great Products
Premium brands all have a unique story they need to tell - it's what helps them stand out in the market. The design team focused on developing media-rich profile pages to help brands tell their story, and a suite of promotional tools to help them share and promote that story with targeted buyers.
Premium Publishing & Distribution
One of our goals was to empower brands to promote themselves with the least amount of effort as possible. From the platform, brands can share their profile - offering buyers a limited view of their company and latest product offerings. They can also create a single Spotlight Collection which is presented to the buyer on their personal homepage.
Actionable Insights
Brands are not accustomed to receiving data on B2B buyer activity. In our V1 iteration, we discovered that brands didn’t know what to do with the data we were sharing with them. So the design team worked on a V2 of the Insights dashboard where we made all the data ‘actionable’. For example, brands can view a list of Trending Products to know which products are most popular with buyers, and then “request to connect” with a desired buyer.
Gaining insights while building community
Since launching the company, the design team has run a program called ‘BORN Innovators’ where we conduct weekly discovery calls with our customers and partners including brands, retailers, agents, tradeshow organizers and showroom owners. We use these 30 minute sessions to learn about their day-to-day operations, and get feedback on specific features and new releases. These sessions have been instrumental in guiding our product roadmap, defining frameworks and personas, and refining our brand “voice” (via product and marketing messaging).
