Gravy Live Native app and eCommerce Website
The Challenge – Create a mobile shopping experience like no other. The original idea for the app was to host a gameshow every night at the same time a-la HQ. On that show, the host would reveal a product to the audience and then start dropping the price of the product from full ultimately to free.
Users could purchase at anytime they felt the product had reached a good deal but the catch was, they had no idea how many we had or who else was buying. If they waited too long, the deal would sell out, and they’d be out of luck. The idea was big and the challenge to package it into an easy to use app was even bigger.
My Role:
Brand identity
Creative direction
UI/ UX design
My Solution
Originally the first version of gravy existed as a live hangout desktop web app. It failed on many fronts so in a last ditch effort I simplified the UI and distilled it down to a wireframe that focused only on a dropping price concept. Since the app was a synchronous experience, we had to rely on a consistent schedule and notifications to get a users attention. Trust was also of the upmost importance, after all, we were selling high ticket items for discounts found nowhere else on the web, it’s only natural that our audience wouldn’t believe us.
The Results
Marketing a synchronous app in an asynchronous world was very difficult. We spent a lot of time and money trying to get users to attend based on our schedule. What we really should have been doing was exhausting those efforts in areas our users already frequented. Giving them the power to decided how and when they visited the app.
The app when through three dramatic pivots during its existence. Originally we focused on tech products but we quickly discovered the tight margins and expensive nature of this vertical. After testing beauty to our existing audience we discovered some promising signs and decided to shift the content completely over. This, however, was too dramatic for quite a bit of our audience and thus created a polarizing environment, ideal for trolls and naysayers.
Influencer marketing is the future, but not the complete picture. If you hitch your wagon to influencers in hopes that they’ll delivery thousands of users tied up in a bow, you’ll be disappointed. In reality, only about 10% of an influencer’s audience is actively engaged and 1% of them will make a purchase.