BuyWander
I’m currently the Jr. Product Lead and principal product designer at BuyWander, an early-stage ecommerce startup which I like to describe as: “the Goodwill bins, but online, and curated.”
From May-July, I was working freelance as a Product Designer for BW, and went full time with the company in July.
Here’s a quick overview of my recent projects—our team moves at lightning speed, so I haven’t had the chance to write detailed case studies yet, but I’d absolutely love to walk you through any of them!
The Products
Buywander.com- B2C
Buywander.com is the customer-facing side of my work, though the current website is built with outdated ecommerce patterns and full of unhelpful UX. While my main work right now is on designing the backend systems that make BuyWander function day-in and day-out, I always have an eye towards the website, and making “low-hanging fruit” fixes that make customers happy while we design other priorities
"CHUK"- Enterprise
“CHUK” is BuyWander’s warehouse management system, built entirely from the ground up for our unique business model. Again, much of CHUK was built before my time, so my major focus has been updating and building out a scalable enterprise application that can manage every point of the process, from receiving a truck full of mixed returns, to the moment the customer walks out the door happy. Most of the work below is from my updates to CHUK!
The Designs
Customer Service Center App
The first project I worked on at BuyWander was creating a new Customer Service center from scratch. Before I joined the team, BW used Waitwhile, a third-party booking software that was costing them over 50k in fees yearly to keep up with our stores’ volume.
After a month of rapid prototyping and design, we launched our customer service and appointment system internally, and its been running smoothly for the last few months, eliminating the need for Waitwhile, and saving us time and money! (yay)
Return Center
Because BuyWander sells returned items in mixed conditions, 7-Day returns are a huge part of our business.
Before I came on, we used Shopify’s return function, but my new native Return Center design has been officially implemented at all 4 of our locations! I also got to conduct some informal user testing and qualitative feedback on the return center, and am working on V2 as we speak (or…read)!
Design System
When I joined Buywander, our WMS app (CHUK) had no unified design system, and design components were being built by frontend developers on the fly.
As soon as I joined the team, I created a robust design system (based on Figma’s Simple Design System) for use in CHUK, and have used it as a source of truth for all my designs.
Manifest Processing
One of the biggest points of loss for BW’s business is in retail inventory that goes unaccounted for because we don’t have a clear way to track inventory “Truck to Trunk” (aka from when we buy it, to when we sell it). Tracking a truck’s manifest before and after it gets to us is a huge step in that process.
I’ve spent the last month building out comprehensive Manifest tracking and analysis tools for CHUK, carefully crafting data displays to squeeze the profit and use out of every manifest of items that we buy and process.
Mobile Design
Especially in an information-dense warehouse setting, mobile-first design has proved to be essential, as most of our Warehouse staff use their phones to access our warehouse application.
With that, every design we launch has mobile styling and capability in mind!