Web Discovery & Recommendation Backlog

Business Overview:
SanMar is a wholesale clothing distributor headquartered in the pacific northwest. They have been in business for 51 years and sell mostly to promotional product distributors.

Problem Statement:
SanMar’s site had not been redesigned in many years. Content, tools, and resources were added, but there was no experience consideration, and a lack of understanding as to what customers actually wanted.

Business Goals:
More effectively conduct business across the entire supply chain. Reduce costs and the number of phone calls territory managers & account executives receive asking for help on the site. Update marketing tools & offerings and improve ordering experience in order to increase sales. Improve education in order to increase engagement and site usage.

Process & Deliverables:
Stakeholder Research
Content Audit
Customer Survey
User Research
Personas
User Scenarios
User Journeys
Opportunity Backlog

Tools Used:
Pen & Paper
Google Meet, Drive, Docs, Sheets
Sketch & Figma

My Role:
Lead UX Designer

Starting Point - Stakeholder Interviews

I interviewed 17 individuals from within SanMar. It was important to hear from several different categories including sales, marketing, operations, and digital. Four distinct categories were uncovered in these interviews:

Brand Perception:

• Customers are not aware of the breadth of capabilities, services, and tools SanMar has to offer them.
• SanMar wants to be known for more than just t shirts and hoodies.
• Customers are unaware and might not care about environmental and sustainability based efforts.

Internal Process:

• The “Resources” section on the site has become a “junk drawer”. Content is added without any real strategy behind it.
• Customers often complain about the site and may not know to reach out to their territory manager for help.
• Website management procedures need to be updated and more refined.

Site Functionality:

• Customers are unaware of several features on the site. They will often call and request an action that can be done on the site.
• Online accounts are not being used by all customers leading to an inability to track customer activity.
• Many customers bypass the site altogether and send their representative their orders via email.

Customer Attributes:

• Customers are looking for SanMar to be trusted advisors that help them make decisions around trends.
• Customers often rely on their territory managers to complete tasks that could be completed on the site.
• Majority of customers have been around for a long time and are "set in their ways".

Validation: These findings helped me determine what would be the most impactful categories to uncover & validate with customers. These included:

What are customers trying to achieve in their business?

How are their end users driving their behaviors and priorities?

What are their top of mind pain points to solve?

What drives how customers currently engage with SanMar?

What do customers actually need and want from SanMar?

Identify which resources are valuable and how they see value in them.

What factors contribute to how customers use the website vs. other shopping avenues.

Where are the opportunities for SanMar to support their customers’ businesses even more?

Customer Survey

In order to be considerate of time constraints, I wanted to gather as much data as possible to inform my understanding of the customer perspective. I worked with SanMar’s analytics team to send a survey to 10,000+ customers. Findings were distilled into 3 priority categories:

High Priority:

• Inventory - proactive status updates
• Inventory - consumer sites
• Inventory - backorders
• Inventory - location

• Discovery - product detail
• Discovery - product suggestion

• Education - product
• Education, Basics - industry & sanmar.com

Medium Priority

• Custom websites
• Tools to improve end user (customer’s customers) interaction

Low Priority

• Shipping & samples
• Image quality
• More exciting inventory
• Selling apparel on Amazon

User Interview Findings

I interviewed 10 customers ranging in size of company they operate, location, and role at company. These users were intentionally selected based on their survey responses and individual priorities. Three main categories were distilled from my findings:

Category 1 - The Satisfied Phone Caller

Uses the site the least frequently. The sentiment of “There is nothing SanMar could improve” is coming from this category. They do not often use the website, rather someone on their team uses it for them. They have been conditioned over time that this is how it’s done, and is why they say everything works great.

Category 2 - The Focused Doer

Customer centricity is priority. Their actions and motivations are driven exclusively by customer requests. Their titles will play a role in this only at some companies, where customer requests driving workflow and actions are a consistency.

Category 3 - The Time-Starved Power User

Category 3’s are the “power users” of the site. They may not even necessarily be placing orders, but more so checking inventory, color availability, and styles extra regularly.

Personas, Journeys & Opportunities

Prior to any of the following deliverables, I synthesized my findings from the survey and interviews to identify any priority overlap within categories to ensure that my recommendation would be most impactful for all customers, rather than one segmentation. This also helped inform the unique journeys and associated opportunities, per journey, that each customer maintains.

Category 1 - The Satisfied Phone Caller:

Category 2 - The Focused Doer

Category 3 - The Power User

Opportunity Backlog

This is formatted in a way to help SanMar more easily determine and prioritize opportunities based on overall level of impact for their customers.

Outcomes & Metrics

• Two full-time SanMar UX designers hired on to continue this work
• Four additional projects initiated upon completion including a design system, secondary site redesign, non product discovery, and custom site discovery