Summers are great. There might be no AC on the tube but we are OK with that. The sun is shining. BBQs are fired up. Socials after work. Sunscreen on the weekend. But it’s also the silly season where POs slow down and sign-offs are delayed as our clients one after the other go on their much-needed holibobs with friends and family. Seeing as we had a slowish August planned after a really busy June and July we decided to have some fun and put some time aside to run our own experiment.

As a consultancy, we like to advise our clients how they should implement their digital transformation strategies or build out their digital capabilities for personalisation or single view of the customer. We talk to small and large companies about agile, innovation, experiments, pivots and the lean startup. Over the last decade and hundreds of projects we have helped a challenger energy startup release a site in six weeks that went on to acquire tens of thousands of customers and a global spirits company launch their very first commerce capability in 12 weeks that sold millions of dollars of product on a lean-as-you like Shopify store. So we decided to take ourselves out of our very own professional services bubble and launch our own business while we had a bit of downtime

“We should definitely sell that!”

Over a skinny iced frappuccino off the old street roundabout on Monday, our very own head of delivery, Nathalie, casually mentioned to our CTO Matt that her husband not only had the same beard as him, but was also a foodie nut. Marc might not bake his own sourdough from an imported San Francisco yeast mother, but he does make his own chilli jam and is selling dozens of jars a month to friends and local businesses. Jamface is a punchy sweet artisan sugar hit that spices up many a creative gathering in the Kent coastal retreat. Currently stocked in deli’s on the east coast, Jamface is making a splash in the DFL (Down from London) crowd who are swapping London Fields in Hackney for the beaches of Margate.

We quickly tasked Nimi one of our experience designers and Mariam in the biz dev team to formulate three hypotheses on how we could take a local craft condiment to market digitally. What digital disruption could we dream up through some good old design thinking? How do we overcome the barrier of shipping charges for a high weight to price ratio product (low consideration or high checkout abandonment)? What do we do about people that normally only buy one jar at a time (average basket value) on a not too frequent basis (average monthly purchase value)?

“You’ve got four weeks to get it live”

With an event planned in late September,  someone had suggested we do a white paper on headless ecom. So this seemed a perfect opportunity to talk about what we learned. The issue was we needed to actually sell some product by then and with some big projects kicking off in early September we had to get moving. Also, Quentin, our strategy lead found a blog post from a New York-based spiced honey startup that did it in 30 days back in 2014. So we set out to do it in 28 days as we already had a product, developers, designers and 5 years of new martech out there to get our hands dirty with.

We are mid-way through exploring the go-to-market strategy. We have a few hurdles to get over. We only started exploring the strategy yesterday. People have been googling ‘headless commerce on Instagram’, asking what the ‘glass’ is and drawing straws on who would be on their bike for the one-hour delivery slot on the august bank holiday. Oh and also Nimi is on holiday from tomorrow so the customer journey needs to be nailed by then.

Stay tuned for our next update.

We are looking forward to putting some of Marc’s hot jam on some of Matt’s sourdough next week when we get our first sample delivered. Also we will tell you how we decided on how we are planning on actually selling a jar or three.

Check out the product that inspired a revolution: www.jamfacejams.com