The last five weeks has been an intense, sometimes hellish, yet rewarding time. During this period, my business partner Stephanie Rydle and I have conceptualized and released the first version of our business – Swedishfresh.com, a website which promotes up to five Swedish designers every quarter to the international market.
I met Stephanie during my studies at Hyper Island and we quickly bonded over our love of cute, aesthetically pleasing Swedish design. We noticed a lot of the high-end Swedish designers were received well abroad, however there was no good way for local designers to compete on the international market – other than to fight for attention on large design sales platforms, like etsy.com or artfire.com. We wanted to provide the opportunity to promote high quality, locally produced Swedish products abroad, so the designers could focus on the creation process. We chose a 3 month time period for each set of designers – as we saw this as a realistic time-frame to launch the designers brands abroad on our site; before accepting a new batch of Swedish designers.
Both Stephanie and I share very similar values, and the same vision for the site. We want to provide a high level of experience to both our customer and to our designer – that is why we place a strong focus on sharing the story of Swedishfresh.com, and of our products. We do not see our website as just another e-store, but a place where visitors can come – to learn more about Sweden, to experience our stories and perhaps to purchase their piece of locally produced Swedish design.
In order to reach this point – we strive to adopt the customer service values of Zappos.com and to consistently test our site for usability, conversion and customer satisfaction. It is a level which we are certain that will take much refining and understanding of customers needs- that’s why we are placing a huge amount of focus on developing our social profiles, in order to engage and enlighten the customer. We have already started a small viral campaign, to find our new logo for our site: the video can be viewed below.
In the coming posts, I would like to share more parts of our process – involving ideation of business idea, procurement of logistics and payment providers, more about the platform Shopify -which we built our site on, and the design & development process. And of course my favorites- Usability testing and techniques to drive traffic to our site.
Our website swedishfresh.com is by no means complete, however we are pleased – given our short time frame, and limited resources with the results to date.
Until the next post, feel free to connect with us on Twitter @Swedishfresh or on our Facebook Fan page.
Below: Current version of landing page
