Summary
- Saved over 1 million pieces of plastic packaging and 140,000kgs of CO2 from being produced
- Raised £5.6m VC/Angel/Crowd investment (View deck)
- Conceived and delivered a fully-functional and commercially-viable system for reusable grocery packaging, completing 87,000 deliveries and £8.8m total revenue.
- Designed and manufactured the world’s first bespoke, fossil fuel-free, reusable food packaging
- Rebranded the service to appeal to female, millennial, conscious consumers.
Responsibilities: Led product, engineering, design, and marketing organised into cross-functional squads. I was responsible for the entire Dizzie customer experience, coordinating customer research and data insights, hands-on UX and UI design, managing growth marketing and funnel iteration, and running RFPs and delivery of agency support with physical product design and branding.
External collaborators: Nice & Serious (Brand), Blond (Physical product design)
Gallery
The Problem
In the UK, we throw away 113 million tonnes of plastic grocery packaging every year, with only 14% ever being recycled. After decades of optimisation of grocery supply chains towards cheap, single-use packaging, plastic is hard to escape from.
Existing ways of solving this problem are time-consuming and inconvenient, passing on the work of refilling to consumers in small, expensive, and disparate zero waste refill stores.
Our vision was to create a scalable, convenient, and affordable reusable grocery packaging service for mainstream consumers.
Research
TL;DR:
- Methods: A mix of surveys, in-person diary studies, data analytics, and unattended user sessions were used to gather rich insights directly from customers.
- Outputs: Customers wanted a bigger range, collections to be fixed, not have to decant products into jars, and to understand the process more clearly upfront.
Having built and launched an MVP of the service in 2021, our aim was to iterate the service towards a fully realised, scalable implementation of our vision for reusable packaging.
Our first step was to understand the pain points of our customers deeply, at every touch point of their journey, gathering qualitative and quantitive insights via a variety of methods directly from our ever helpful customers.
On-going customer surveys and data insights
Customer insights were central to the business's DNA. Throughout the lifetime of the business, we conducted longitudinal customer surveys to collect both quantitative data (NPS, Product-Market Fit etc.) and qualitative sentiment from customers at various points in their life-cycle, as well as using Amplitude, Google Analytics, and Postgres Dashboard ‘Redash’ to interrogate our data and track our progress.
Key takeaways 🍕
- People wanted more products in reusable packaging. A great sign for the business - customers wanted more of what we did. Common themes here were around customers still having to shop with big retailers/supermarkets to get everything they needed. If we could cater for more of their basket, customers would likely buy it.
- Collections were a problem for customers. We used Evri to collect our returnable boxes from customers’ doorsteps the day after delivery. When this worked, it was magic - customers left boxes on their doorsteps/by their bins, and it was whisked away without them needing to book a collection or interact with a courier. However, when it didn’t work, it was incredibly painful (e.g. multiple failed attempt contacts from the courier, no simple ‘unhappy path’ resolution, boxes sat on properties for weeks) and our OTIF (On time, in full) metric told us it didn’t work a lot: ~20% of the time. Clearly not a good enough success rate for a scalable service.
In-home diary study
There’s no better customer insight than observing problems first-hand in the environment and at the time they occur. This is particularly true when analysing our end-to-end service, a large part of which was offline and encompassed physical interactions (e.g. delivery, using products in the home, returning empty packaging).
We visited 20 customer homes across the country, observing and documenting their experience and pain points, with particular attention on the physical aspects that couldn’t be captured in our platform data.
Key takeaways 🍕
- Decanting products from packaging to jars is inconvenient. Customers generally wanted the convenience of single-use packaging but without the waste, so encouraging customers to decant into their own jars was proving a time-sink (e.g. one customer reported spending an hour decanting every order) and needing containers to decant into was a blocker to purchasing more products.
"I know I should send them back but have been doing it on the next order - is that a bit cheeky?"
- Pot design is unappealing and takes up too much space in the home. Using white, clinical, off-the-shelf pots to send our products jars (no pun intended) with the expectations of a grocery brand, and the plastic material was at odds with customers’ desire to reduce the amount of plastic in their homes.
"It's a bit annoying that there aren't smaller tubs as some of them take up loads of space"
Unattended user testing
To gather insights from the digital experience, we used user testing tool Userbrain to invite new customers to evaluate the value proposition and place their first order.
For this proposition testing, we asked potential customers to explain what they understood the service to be at various points of the customer journey.
Key takeaways 🍕
- Users didn’t easily understand aspects of delivery and collection - Having things collected after delivery is not a mental modal people are generally familiar with. We needed to do much better at explaining the simplicity of how it worked in order to take away any undue anxiety before trying the service.
- Users were concerned about pot returns / having jars to decant into / being penalised for not returning etc. - Further validating the issues around decanting, new customers were concerned about the complexity and cost of having containers to decant their products into in order to quickly return their packaging.
Brand testing
Due to multiple pivots along its journey, the business had a bit of an identity crisis. Still clinging on to its roots as a cut-price sustainable food retailer, the consensus throughout the business was that the Good Club name and brand needed to evolve to more accurately communicate the strategic focus on reusable packaged products.
To validate these suspicions, we ran surveys on the consumer research platform Attest.
Key takeouts 🍕
- Participants perceived the brand as ‘deep green’ and didn’t resonate with a more mainstream customer.
- The ‘Club’ aspect of the name caused people to think it was exclusive or some sort of subscription service.
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The Solution
Having validated and prioritised the biggest business problems to solve, we set about overhauling every part of the service to better meet customer needs.
TL;DR:
- Designed and manufacturerd bespoke reusable pots made from a fossil fuel-free bio-polymer
- Rebranded the business to appeal to a female, millennial, conscious consumer audience
- Created a dynamic labelling solution to produce short runs of >350 SKUs on-demand
- Partnered with a new courier to execute the perfect delivery and collection experience
- Re-architectured the site to provide improved navigation, rich product pages to increase organic search traffic, and single-step checkout
- Re-skinned the design system to follow the new brand
Making our reusable pots
Off the back of an Innovate UK grant set up to further the development of the UK’s circular economy, we enlisted the help of London product design agency, Blond, to design and manufacture our new packaging.
Starting with materials research, we hit upon a new bio-polymer developed by Swedish materials giant Stora Enzo. The fossil fuel-free Durasense material is made from 60% used cooking oil, and 40% wood fibres - a bi-product from the papermaking process. Food safe, with very similar properties to plastic (lightweight, hardy, and injection mouldable), and with a closed-loop end-of-life that enables packaging to be re-made into more reusable food packaging - the material was perfect for our pots.
After initial design exploration, Blond developed a system of stackable pots with a returnable box that locked products in place, allowing for the total elimination of all internal packaging. The tapered pot design allowed them to be stacked inside each other when being transported empty, meaning 6x space saving over our existing packaging, drastically reducing logistics CO2 emissions and cost.
Due to manufacturing tooling costs, we decided not to produce the boxes and continue with our off-the-shelf tote boxes until further investment had been raised.
Initial packaging research
Early explorations into existing packaging types and concepts.
Early sketches
We quickly hit upon the idea of a tesselating pot that neatly stacked and fit perfectly into the returnable box.
Design development
Brand & marketing
In parallel to developing the packaging, we hired the sustainability-focused branding agency Nice & Serious to reposition the brand. Our brief was simple: Move the brand out of the ‘deep green’ eco-space, and into something that would attract a mainstream, millennial, predominantly female, conscious consumer.
Dropping the ‘Good Club’ name, we settled (from a very long list) on the name Dizzie - suggestive of circularity, different to everything else in the market, and with a positive, joyful ring to it. Complete with a bold colour palette, modern typography, and a set of brand mascots to aid brand recall, Dizzie was given a distinct, ownable style to give maximum shelf presence and stand out amongst an eco-sea of green and beige.
Labelling design system
Labelling is a big deal for food packaging. It must be compliant with all government regulations and be easily identifiable on shelves in stores and people’s homes. We were also very concerned with both reducing the cost and reducing environmental impact of our products, and our labelling was letting us down.
Our early labels were ugly. Produced on-demand with a thermal printer, the print quality was bad and every product label looked identical. The label stock itself was also a problem - the easy-peel adhesive, required for the easy removal of labels so that the pot could be reusable), was made from PP plastic that was both single-use and hard to recycle.
Working with our ops team and label suppliers, we developed a new label design system that used the new brand palette and custom illustrations to help give each SKU an identifiable look. The label stock was replaced with a paper material and water wash-off adhesive, along with an Ops process to quickly soak and remove the label.
Because of our new tapered pots, the label also had to be ‘banana-shaped’, meaning the artwork had to be distorted to specific angles, to correctly follow the curvature of the pot.
Finished packaging
Redesigning the delivery and collection experience
To improve the delivery and collection success rate from <80% to an acceptable level, and improve the unhappy path when things went wrong with Evri, we teamed with new courier start-up, Packfleet, to design the ultimate delivery and collection experience.
We devised a system where Packfleet would deliver in reusable bags, instead of our bulky boxes. This meant customers could keep hold of packaging until their next delivery, removing the need for the courier to come back the next day - a better experience for the customer, and fewer trips to people’s doors means lower costs for us and less CO2 emitted (plus Packfleet only deliver in electric vans!).
The new system improved first-time delivery and collection success to 99%, with customer’s generally preferring the new system.
Rebuilding the design system
With a totally new name and brand, the existing design system needed iterating. Constructed from a library of components, I created our design system to allow myself and the team to quickly throw together UI concepts.
Launch
getdizzie.com launched to the public on 16th September 2022, moving domains while retaining organic search traffic and with zero downtime or interruption to service.
Press
- Dizzie rebrand in Creative Review
- Dizzie rebrand on Creative Boom
- Dizzie ‘Packaging as service’ in The Grocer
- Dizzie packaging in Dexigner
Investment
Dizzie is currently raising £600k equity crowdfunding investment on Crowdcube to secure its future and take reusable packaging to mainstream supermarkets and brands.
