Sustainable shopping from
farm to phone.
When Lakewinds decided to update the co‑op member experience, they called us.
Lakewinds started in 1975 as a little red shack on Lake Minnetonka. Today, it's a growing chain in the Minneapolis area and one of the country's model food cooperatives. Still, for all its local charm, it contends in a cutthroat market with the likes of Amazon and Costco, and has to justify the cost of memberships relative to perks and prices offered by competitors. In this landscape, a first-class digital experience can be an edge for attracting and retaining owner-members and maximizing loyalty and share-of-wallet among them. That's precisely what we set out with Lakewinds to imagine, validate, and build.
A friendlier, faster checkout.
If you're a co-op member, you probably know this drill. Each trip through the checkout lane starts out with a barrage of routine questions. While there's a great reason to ask each one, they disrupt an opportunity for the customer to connect with the staff in the warm, casual, neighborly way that sets local shopping apart. There has to be a better way.
This moment was the focus of our collaboration with Lakewinds. We sought out ways technology could be used to streamline the checkout process and free both the customer and cashier to connect as humans, not just trading partners. We also looked for opportunities to use data gathered from those interactions to improve Lakewinds' member experience and bottom line business performance.
Ready, set, sprint.
While we knew there was a compelling opportunity in and around the checkout experience, we weren't sure it was the only one worth pursuing. With the underlying goals of driving increases in member count, basket size, and trip frequency, we kicked the collaboration off with a GV-style design sprint to identify the biggest opportunity available to us and learn as much as we could as quickly as possible. Five days, two prototypes, six testers, and countless La Croixs later, we arrived at a winning concept and hunkered down to start following the most promising paths uncovered.
Created for both sides of the counter.
While the customer story was the first thing on our minds, Lakewinds employees play a pivotal supporting role. In addition to creating the mobile app for owner-members, we also worked hard to get the behind-the-counter experience right for cashiers and account for the human factors that separate the effortless from the awkward, as well as the creative and technical constraints imposed by Lakewinds' point-of-sale system.
Hiding the seams so it all just works.
Delivering a seamless mobile checkout experience for a store like Lakewinds isn't a simple task. It requires skillfully integrating a number of systems—many of which are custom and often rather quirky—to pull it all off. We worked with Lakewinds to create a modern, scalable architecture for managing member information, transaction data, coupons and discounts, and more all through a single, intuitive REST interface.
Our contributions.
Product Management
- Product Ownership
- Project Management
Strategy & Research
- Product Strategy & Vision
- Design Sprints
- User Research
- Concepting & Prototyping
Product Design
- Native Mobile Design
- Motion & Animation Design
Development
- Web Services Development
- iOS Development