Designing with De-Brand

I can see why a start-up CEO is a good representation of a Design Thinker – Wes and Amelia of De-Brand definitely embody Tim Brown’s Design Thinker personality profile of being empathetic, integrative thinkers, optimistic, experimental, and collaborative. They both can imagine the world from both perspectives, for example, on the marketing side creating the waste and also from a consumer standpoint where they wonder where this waste is actually going. They are both integrative thinkers in the sense that they are pioneers in the industry they have created for themselves and also have had to experiment with various business models (doing everything, i.e. marketing waste, events, product to now mainly specialising in product waste) to create a sustainable business model. Furthermore, collaboration among team members is extremely vital when resources are limited – their level of optimism and energy about their business and what the future holds for them is contagious which further fuels the collaboration among their team.

I felt that the Business Canvas model was a good starting point to analyse a business in the sense that it captured all the important aspects of a business from revenues, costs, value proposition, channels, customer segments, and key resources/activities/partnerships. Thus, it was useful because it provided us a guideline of what questions to ask De-Brand. However, where I feel the Business Canvas is lacking is the relationship between each aspect because that is very dependent on the structure and nature of the business. Harrison and I recognized this problem and thus set out to find a model which could link each aspect of the business in a way that accurately shows how the business operates. You could say that this is where our “real designing” took place – through trial-and-error, we created several models and had to make multiple versions before we came up with one which we felt effectively communicated De-Brand’s business model.

Working with a start-up client on this project was very rewarding in the sense that it isn’t everyday that we get to interact with these creative individuals. When we were presenting our business canvases to the CEOs in the studio, they were extremely engaging and it felt that not only were they interested to hear what we thought of their business, but were also eager to give us feedback on our thinking process and offer suggestions of how we could improve going about analysing an issue in the future. It was extremely inspirational to have gotten to meet these individuals who were all so passionate about their ideas and I felt privileged to be privy to the thought process behind their business.