Rockets of Awesome, a kids clothing brand, had developed a lot of traction. However, it was becoming hard to ignore that its dependence on a subscription model (and only a subscription model) was limiting its growth.

So, the company decided to open up its online shop to the public. Customers would now be able to purchase ROA’s clothing without a subscription.

The problem? The entire site — its architecture, flows, copy, data modeling, customer support backend, all of it — was based on the assumption that any user on the site was also a subscriber. Throw in a public shopper? Everything fell apart.

I started by going through the site, hand in hand Engineering, and recording every time a user experience would fall apart.

To do this, I created a system to identify our customer types. On top of our normal “A” and “B” users — we now had “C” and “D” and “E’” customers. Any given flow might work for “A, B, C” customers and “D” customers but not “E.”

I worked carefully over several weeks to craft and correct flows for all of our new users. How could these users create accounts? Track orders? Change payment info? Following this, I worked with Marketing/Creative to revisit the copy-site wide. How do we talk about (i.e sell) the subscription in a world where it isn’t required?

Finally, I spruced up the site’s UI. Now that the Shop was publicly viewable — it needed some over-due clean up and modernization.

The company rolled out the new shop in stages and was still doing so when I left to join Flatiron Health. However, if you visit the site today you’ll see that the shift to include public e-comm is complete — thanks to this early groundwork from the team. ✨