HOW DO YOU DIFFERENTIATE YET ANOTHER ONLINE GROCERY STORE?
*TRULY* UNDERSTAND SHOPPERS’ NEEDS, THEN BUILD THE UX FROM THERE.

 
 

PROJECT

The mission of Home Delivery Services (HDS) was to deliver an eCommerce experience unlike any other. Starting out in the fresh grocery category, the service used AI-powered robotics to assemble orders, package them in reusable totes, and hand them off to friendly couriers, who were to offer retail-level customer service, right at a customer’s doorstep. Following a successful round of funding, I joined the HDS team to help the company’s business and technology leaders build out a fresh, creative, and customer-centric brand.
 

WORK

  • Naming

  • Messaging & Positioning Work

  • Marketing Communications Development - pitch decks, sales and business development materials, press releases, etc.

  • Product Strategy

  • Design Strategy & Creative Direction

PRODUCT STRATEGY

 

When I started my work with HDS, there were already plans to supplement the fresh grocery offering with customized, made-to-order food. The idea was that getting the exact cut of meat and marinade you wanted, or customizing items like sandwiches and pizzas, could be enough to differentiate the grocery service—but I felt something was missing.

Mapping out the competitive landscape, it became clear that the company needed to find a more meaningful differentiator. Teriyaki chicken and pineapple on your pizza was nice, but that wasn’t going to cut it.

As I started the discovery process and did some research into the history of the grocery store, it dawned on me that if customization was intended to be one of HDS’ core brand pillars, there were opportunities to infuse a high degree of personalization into the digital experience, itself.

To this end, I expanded the vision of what a customized grocery experience meant for an HDS shopper, imagining an entirely new approach to digital merchandising, built around each shopper’s specific dietary preferences and needs.

 
 
 

So, if you were a vegetarian and shopping for snacks, why should you see turkey jerky and pork rinds? If you had a child allergic to peanuts, why not eliminate every item containing them, effectively creating a peanut-free inventory, across all categories, just for your family?

If HDS wanted to be a new kind of grocery store, it needed to leverage its digital-first capabilities to offer a new kind of experience. And I offered that cataloging the ingredients for every single SKU, then repopulating the store’s entire inventory and merchandising around these individual preferences could be just the kind of transformative shopping experience that the brand needed.

NAMING

Ultimately, HDS planned to expand beyond fresh grocery category and become a robotics-powered brand to meet all the day-to-day needs of busy households. ‘Home Delivery Service’ was always a placeholder name, and part of my engagement with the company was to help them find their forever name.

My exploration was to look for a name that was:

  • Succinct - Ideally one word, and not more than two syllables. I searched for a short word that
    could easily slide into casual conversation, ie: “Honey, don’t forget to add OJ to XXXX for our Thursday delivery.”

  • Extensible - A word that wasn’t just relative to HDS’ initial fresh grocery offering, but one that could
    extend out to encompass the full vision of carrying all kinds of household essentials.

  • Meaningful - I wasn’t looking for an ‘empty vessel’ name. I wanted a name that had some kind of
    reference, even if only tangential, to root it in meaning.

After an extensive search, we landed on:

 
 
 

Oona was a great option for a number of reasons. It was clean, modern, and had a sense of uniqueness with the double ‘O’. It also gave off a feeling of foreign sophistication, as an alternate spelling of ‘Una’ - the feminine version of ‘One’, in Spanish.

Why was one meaningful to HDS? Because once the company ramped up past fresh grocery, it aimed to carry a vast variety of good on its shelves. The vision was that Oona would be the customer’s ONE-stop-shop for all their daily shopping needs.

RESULTS

After building out the company messaging, I collaborated with a talented PR contractor on announcing HDS’ most recent fundraising round and partnerships. Our efforts were featured on Forbes, Bloomberg, and a number of other tier-one business publications.

Here’s what Monique Apter, SVP of Sales at HDS, had to say about working closely with me:

“Alli has an uncanny ability to distill conceptual thinking into a digestible story. She has a natural talent for visualizing the end game and helping you put the right pieces in place to get there. She is direct and challenges status quo. I enjoyed collaborating with her and found she always took any idea and made it better. She is creative, talented and whimsical.”