GRADUATE WORK IN DESIGN STRATEGY

Developing a Complete Business Plan for a New Pet Deli & Delivery

Inspired by our own love of our pets, troubled by frequent pet food recalls, and empowered by observed growth in the pet products industry, our team set out to create a business plan for a pet deli. Spot at the Table was conceived as a high-quality, fresh pet food and delivery service with retail storefronts that offer pet guardians radical transparency into the making of their pets' food. We carried out customer and market research as well as mapping out a five year operational and financial plan for the business, which we pitched to a panel of Silicon Valley investors.

[Project for Venture Studio, MBA in Design Strategy, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2016]

Creating a Compelling Value Proposition for Target Customers

Festive.ly, a startup online event planning platform, was created by an inspired founder who was uncertain how to get it off of the ground. Our project team was tasked with helping him optimize his product-market fit and to communicate and deliver the most compelling value proposition possible to event planning professionals

[Project for Business Models & Stakeholders, MBA in Design Strategy, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2015]

Improving Operations at a Fast-Growing Non-Profit

Our team worked with an Oakland non-profit to identify operational challenges and create a strategic toolkit for making improvements. The organization had been very successful in establishing itself and had grown rapidly in its first two years of operations. However, with its success came the challenge of establishing systems, processes, and roles to ensure that the organization would be able to continue offering its members a high level of hospitality.

[Project for Operations & Strategies, MBA in Design Strategy, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2015]

Designing a Public Space to Engage a Community in Madrid

We began with a provocative question: How might we join as urban activators in the larger physical,
economic, and cultural forces that produce urban space? The culmination of our three-week project was designing and building staging for a TEDx Madrid Salon event in the San Cristobal de los Angeles neighborhood, which could be re-purposed after the event for a variety of uses by the community.

[Project for Vienna/Madrid Urban Act(ivat)ors Summer Studio, MBA in Design Strategy, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2015]

Translating Customer Experiences into a Product Concept & Marketing Plan

Our client, a smart home device startup, was looking for opportunities to develop an inexpensive, emerging back-end technology to support a range of affordable smart home devices. Our team conducted market insights research in order to identify the experiences consumers aspire to in their homes and translate these into a product concept, validate the concept with consumers, and develop an executable marketing plan.

[Project for Market Insights Studio, MBA in Design Strategy, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2015]

Empowering a New Generation of Financial Customers

We began with the question: What is the future of money? Zeroing in on young adults, we uncovered a key insight: for those just gaining financial independence, resources are limited while spending money is as easy as a single online click. In order to empower these individuals to set and meet achievable savings goal, we developed a concept for Buckkit: an in-browser tool that enables users to set spending goals and track them in real time while browsing retail sites.