Overview

The rise of fast-fashion retailers like H&M, Primark, and Zara has flipped the retail model, forcing brands to make quicker decisions, collaborate from anywhere and deliver on consumer trends. Bamboo Rose is a leading multi-enterprise product and supply chain platform that connects the retail community and helps retailers and suppliers bring great products to market faster, more efficiently, and at higher margins.

Undersanding Customer Needs

Bamboo Rose asked Cantina to design a comprehensive messaging capability to improve its existing platform and live up to the demands of buyers and suppliers who are frequently collaborating in the field. Cantina’s goal was to design an approach that was both immediately familiar and that could also significantly improve their customers’ ability to collaborate. By keeping customers within the Bamboo Rose platform and providing mechanisms to capture the often complex contexts of their shared workflows, Cantina’s solution aimed to replace many of the out-of-system interactions that customers had come to rely on to get their work done.

We began by understanding the intricate nature of Bamboo Rose’s business and the role it plays in the fashion world. Using journey mapping, we plotted the way retail products, like apparel and home furnishings, make their way from idea to storefront. This work helped us to better grasp the nuances of Bamboo Rose’s value in helping brands develop big ideas between retailers, buyers, and suppliers. We expanded our research to consider best practices from highly-regarded communication platforms like Salesforce, Basecamp, Pinterest, and Slack.

Cantina introduced the Design Sprint framework to business, technology, and design leaders at Bamboo Rose to quickly understand the problems they were trying to solve with a real-time project communication concept. The collaborative sessions yielded great ideas from the whole team, and the resulting prototype was tested, refined, and brought into development.

Designing an Effective Solution

Working together with the Bamboo Rose product team, Cantina facilitated a “show and tell” workshop that highlighted the best features from other platforms and described how similar features could fit into the workflows of Bamboo Rose’s customers. Building on this research, we storyboarded the different customer scenarios and product features that we believed were important to include based on the feedback we received from the Bamboo Rose team.

These scenarios were prototyped to include functionality and design interactions. With Bamboo Rose in the room, we were able to create a continuous feedback loop that helped to rapidly iterate on our ideas and accelerate validation of our designs. Once all of the customer scenarios were approved, higher fidelity prototypes were constructed to illustrate the design and screen flows being recommended for development.

Delivering a Real-time Messaging System for Bamboo Rose

Bamboo Rose’s mission is to make retail better through its digital B2B marketplace in a number of ways: make collaboration and decision-making processes easier and find the hottest fashion trends more quickly. By being on the cutting edge of how B2B platforms work and best practices in digital communication, Cantina was able to quickly research, design, and implement a messaging system that would better meet Bamboo Rose’s customer needs and further differentiate Bamboo Rose as a leading B2B marketplace in its space.