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Design is the main differentiator in the age of AI, Carl Rivera says. For months, Rivera, Shopify’s chief design officer, has been reorienting his team around this idea. And now, with a new acquisition, he’s doubling down on his thesis. Rivera announced that Shopify just bought Molly, a small Brooklyn design studio known for its inventive work with brands like Apple, Google, and Nike. Shopify declined to share financial details of the deal. With the acquisition, Mollys seven-person team will become the new Shopify Product Design Studio, Rivera says, reporting directly to him and serving as an in-house Navy SEAL squad tasked with reimagining the next era of commerce from the ground up, powered by AI. Rivera explains that Shopify is buying Molly for the way they solve problems as a unit. He believes the new team will serve as a template for how the rest of the Shopify UX design structure should work, which focuses on centralized, flexible teams. Mollys role, he says, will be to inject vision, strategy, and future-forward design across Shopifys most critical and experimental projects, helping other teams visualize and build UX breakthroughs instead of siloed features. It comes at a time when Shopify as a whole is pouring resources into being AI-first. Rivera says Molly will be the prototype for this new operating model in which the organization is not centered around departments like payments or shopping carts but around challenges that span across many departments. Were flattening the organization, he says, with expert teams that can be deployed against different problems. Why Shopify is betting it all on design Riveras vision for the AI era is a refreshing challenge to Silicon Valley orthodoxy. In this sort of AI war that we find ourselves in, the companies that are building the foundation models are at the forefront and fighting over talent, he says. But second only to researchers building foundation models, the most valuable talent in the entire market right now are the designers. In that way, he is framing the studio buyout as a strategic land grab. While the rest of the tech world chases PhDs and model benchmarks, Riveras bet is different. He describes it as arbitragea moment for design to win disproportionate value before the rest of the market catches on. The problem of the engineering-first perspective is that the current AI interaction paradigm is extremely stone age, extremely naive, and kind of obviously wrong, he says. Most products still treat AI as a bolted-on feature, not a core experience, which is why UX designers are so important. Rivera believes that most companies in Silicon Valley are ignoring the real arms race, which is happening around the form factor, or the way users emotionally connect to products. I believe so deeply, so strongly, that the thing that will set companies apart, like when anyone can create anything and all products can be generated at will, the difference between one that is functional and that is memorable is the form factor, he says. Its the thing that makes it click for you. The real innovation will be driven by designers who discover and define AIs lasting form factor. Rivera also believes that this UX revolution will happen in New York. If San Francisco built the models, New York will build the experiences, he tells me. Shopifys design ambitions, and dollars, will flow through the citys creative arteriescreating a hub that attracts the worlds best designers to produce the best work of their careers, defining the future interaction patterns of AI. The Molly template Rivera didnt just want to hire any designers. He wanted a very special team, he says. One that would serve as a model for how Shopify should work because the old organization modelisolated specialists attached to siloed teamswasnt made for AI. AI doesnt give an F about the boundaries, he says. It forces you to break up how you work as a company. Founded just two years ago, Molly had previously worked with Rivera on several projects, including Demo Nights in their Brooklyn studio, and collaborations with brands like Apple, Google, Nike, and AirPods. Seeing how they worked, Rivera realized they were the ideal team for that: I had seen that work. I was very inspired by that work. And then, to be honest, I went out to dinner with them . . . You know how you sit down and have a conversation and things click. Yeah, it just clicks. In their site, the Molly team describes their practice as a creative labwriting experimental frameworks, dissecting UI paradigms, and exploring the API-ification of everything. As their announcement of the sale puts it, weve built a deep library of frameworks and strategy, not only for the process of how we work, but in our theory for how products and the web should interact, behave, and disclose content. They see Shopify as the natural next step for deep impact: The studio model excels in a lot of relationships, but one thing its not ideal for: long-term, deep impact across an entire organization. And this is exactly what Carl Rivera and Tobi Lütke approached us about. New studio, new operating model Now, Riveras plan is to turn Molly into the Shopify Product Design Studio. Theyre going to stay as a team, seven people, deployed against some of our most important, most strategic investments, he explains. To that end, their work will be both practical and theoretical. Rivera says they will join product teams to inject vision and clarity about what the next 18 months could look like. That’s not an arbitrary amount of time; Rivera believes thats the maximum you can plan into the future. Meanwhile, the teams will work on taking the necessary steps to making that vision real in a two-week timeframe, working backwards to build it now. Rivera believes Mollys example will spark a shift company-wide: Instead of trying to fit people into process, you have to build process around the people that know how to navigate this time and age. Thats the theory, at least. Now they need to walk that talk. If they dont produce work that is outstanding and that represents the vision Im proposing, then this whole thing falls flat, he laughs.
Category:
E-Commerce
A hundred years ago, it wasn’t easy being a reader. Books were expensive and libraries weren’t common, so it was hard to get your hands on your next read. In 1926, a magazine editor, professor, and book publisher tried to solve the problem with a mail order company called the Book of the Month Club. The men would read upcoming books, select what they considered the best, then mass-produce them, thereby driving the price down. For decades, thousands of readers across America relied on the catalog to discover new literature. But by the early 2010s, when Blake Orlandia recent Harvard Business School graduatestumbled across the company, it had lost its luster. Consumers had no shortage of places to buy affordable books, from Amazon to Barnes & Noble to their local indie bookstore. Book of the Month had sunk to offering books at bargain-basement prices, but even then, it was quickly shrinking. “Amazon did everything that Book of the Month was purporting to do, but better because of technology,” says Orlandi. “The company was basically hollowed out.” [Photo: Book of the Month] Still, Orlandi couldn’t get Book of the Month out of his mind. The legacy company seemed to have so much potential, if only it could be reimagined for the current reading landscape. “Consumers today have a paradox of choice,” he says. “Book of the Month’s original mission of curating books suddenly seemed compelling again.” Along with his business partner, John Lippman, Orlandi bought the skeletal remains of the Book of the Month Club. In 2016, in the midst of the direct-to-consumer boom, they relaunched it as a subscription business targeted at millennialsand particularly women, who make up the majority of its customers. Every month, the club offers a selection of only five recently released hard cover books, largely fiction with the occasional memoir. Since the company acquires the right to publish each title with a “Book of the Month” logo on the cover, it can price these books cheaper than you were to get them at a book store. Members pay between $13 and $17 a book, depending on their plan, but they can skip anytime. Growth mode Orlandi is now the brand’s CEO. Over the past nine years, Book of the Month has grown to 400,000 members. It generates money from subscription fees and is profitable. It has lower margins than a traditional bookseller because it publishes the books itself. “We have a very different business model than a bookstore that pays the publisher for each book it sells,” Orlandi says. “We publish a small number of titles and we’re highly incentivized to make sure we sell all of them.” Book of the Month is now a powerful player in helping to put books and authors on the map, along the lines of celebrity book clubs, like those founded by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager. V. E. Schwab says when her novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was selected by Book of the Month Club in 2020, it exposed her work to a new audience. Until that point, she had been largely seen as a fantasy author, but the club introduced her work to fans of literary fiction. [Photo: Book of the Month] Book of the Month’s success is particularly impressive given that the percentage of Americans that read fiction is actively declining: In 2017, 42% of adults read fiction, and in 2022, that had gone down to 38%. A 2022 Gallup survey found that Americans read an average of 12.6 books a year, three fewer books than they read in the early 2000s. But over last nine years, the company has gained deep insight into the habits and identities of millennial and Gen Z readers, what makes a successful book, and how social media is transforming the reading experience. “There is this narrative that reading is dying because we’re glued to our phones,” says Brianna Goodman, Book of the Month’s editorial director, who runs the team that selects each month’s five books. “But that’s not what we’re finding. People seem to be turning to books precisely to escape being online.” [Photo: Book of the Month] What Women (Readers) Want Over the years, Book of the Month has zeroed in on the demographic of people who still continue to read for pleasure. It found that more women than men are reading on a regular basis: a quarter of men read fiction while for women, that figure is roughly half. “We didn’t have a clear sense of the target market when we bought the company,” says Orlandi. “But we quickly began to figure it out.” Book of the Month’s most devoted members are college-educated women in their early to late twenties, who read one or more books a month. Orlandi says that this age is the sweet spot when people are no longer reading for school, but don’t yet have kids. When the brand relaunched, it tried to make the brand enticing to this demographic of millennial women. Much of its branding was similar to millennial-oriented startups of that era, like Glossier, Away, and Warby Parker. The website and app were clean and minimalist, with playful fonts, and saturated in a sophisticated blue color. In contrast to Amazon’s overwhelming volume of books, Book of the Month focused on curation, spotlighting the five books available that month. In the early years, when social media marketing was still affordable, Book of the Month advertised on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, targeting women with ads that portrayed reading as part of a chic lifestylesomething you did with wine, in an attractive apartment. Over time, when the brand hit a critical mass, it began to grow by word of mouth. Members get a free book for every person they get to sign up. The physical books themselves have become home decor, with members often posting photos of them on their bookshelves. “Our members seem to like the idea of books as objects,” says Goodman. “So much of our life is digital, and there’s something satisfying about seeing a physical pile of books you’ve read and loved.” Now, Gen Z is just hitting the late twenties prime-reading age. But that doesn’t mean that older readers aren’t still valuable. Orlandi says there’s a certain kind of woman who self-identifies as a reader. It’s not just an activity, it’s how they see themselves. Often, it comes from positive childhood experiences with reading, or growing up in a family that valued books. These are the ideal Book of the Month customers and the company spends a lot of effort trying to bring them into the fold. It targets them on social media and rewards customers who get their friends to sign up with free books. “We’re a subscription business, and ideally, we want to have members with us for decades,” says Orlandi. (Readers can pause the service for months or years at a time with no penalty.) “Readers may go through phases when they don’t have time to read, but they will eventually come back to books, and we want to be there to help them find the right one.” It’s All About Curation While cool branding and targeted marketing are important, Orlandi believes that the success of the business hinges on how well it can curate books. If a member has a bad experience with a book, they may quit and never come back. (The company has Reader’s Guarantee that allows a member to get a new book if they don’t like the one they picked.) If they find an unexpected book that they can’t put down, there’s a good chance they will be a lifelong customer. For many readers, trying to pick the next book is overwhelming, given the pace of publishing. This is also hard for authors, who are struggling to break through. But Book of the Month can help cut through the noise. Take V.E. Schwab, whose book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was a Book of the Month pick in the fall of 2020. “As a fantasy author . . . I’d rarely shown up on the shelves of those who preferred more grounded/realistic work,” says Schwab. “But thanks to Book of the Month, my audience not only grew, but so did some readers’ concept of the shapes and scope that fantasy could take.” Goodman, who oversees a team of seven editorial assistants, says picking books is not an exact science. The company hires people they believe have good taste and instincts. Every month, they go through hundreds of books that publishers send their way, and they choose five to seven. Their goal is to choose the very best book in a number of different categories, from romances, to fantasy, to literary fiction, to thrillers. “It’s hard to say exactly what makes it a right pick,” Goodman says. “It needs to feel fresh, like we haven’t read something like this before. The author needs to be doing something original with words.” As experts have analyzed the decline in reading, they argue that screensfrom social media on our phones to video-streaming servicesare edging out reading in our leisure time. Goodman says that part of what her team is trying to do is to get readers hooked on books that are exciting enough to entice them away from their smartphone addiction. This is why pulpy page turners always have a place on the list. Goodman believes that people are also getting tired of being online. They turn to Book of the Month to return to a slower, more analog pace of life, and the company’s curation team takes this responsibility seriously. “People have limited time, and they’re looking to books to get away from their troubles,” she says. “We want to make sure their time is well spent.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Weve all been there: staying at work late. Complaining about not enough time in a day. Spending more hours staring at a glowing screen in a cubicle than youd ever want to. And then we complain about how far outside the 9-to-5 our workday has stretched past. Maybe its because were a bit more unorganized than wed like to admit. Or maybe were not prioritizing your time and workload in the most effective ways. Or perhaps we just cant stay on track with assignments or projects. Its okayit happens to the best of us. Still, these poor work habitsthese sneaky time trapscould be dragging your day longer and depriving you of your off-the-clock time. Heres how to identify possible traps that could be sucking up your time, and how you can get back on track for work-life balance. What are the sneaky issues that are usurping your time at work? Many of the reasons why youre working late are tiny, sneaky, easy to miss. But they all slow you down and make you less efficient: Excessive chatting with colleagues. A quick chat by the watercooler with a coworker is nice (even good for your career and happiness), but be mindful of your time. Quick conversations can easily turn into 30-minute catchups, says Kiki Ramsey, CEO and founder of Positive Psychology Coaching and Diversity Institute in Atlanta, a leadership development firm. A better approach is to schedule a lunch or coffee break instead, she suggests. Be mindful of your breaks. A quick break can turn into scrolling on your phone for way too long, cautions Ramsey. Use a timer to keep breaks short and purposeful. Refrain from handling personal issues on the clock. Post-pandemic, remote work has changed what the typical workday looks like for many. But “although the boundaries between work and personal have been skewed, personal calls or errands can chip away at focus and productivity,” she said. It may feel more efficient, or that youre taking advantage of your jobs flexibility, but it may inadvertently cause your to-do list to drag past dinnertime. Consider using your weekly workflow plan to block out specific timessuch as lunchto run that errand or make that personal call, or handle them before or after work. Learn to say no. Boost both your confidence and time-management skills by declining when others ask you to do their work. Taking on tasks that arent yours can distract you from your own priorities, explains Ramsey. Its more effective to learn to say no, in a gentle way, and redirect work back to the right person. Stop micromanaging coworkers. You could be wasting time getting too involved in worrying about what your colleagues are doing. Keeping tabs on others and riding them may feel like youre trying to streamline processes, but it can have the opposite effect. Over-checking others tasks wastes time and creates unnecessary stress for you and them, warns Ramsey. Instead, trust the process: offer support when needed, and focus on your own responsibilities. Mind your own business, figuratively and actionably. How to sneak past the sneaky time traps First, planning ahead with a broad to-do list can reduce the chance youre dawdling at work and wasting time. It sounds simplebecause it is. Its a low-effort tweak to our routine. But many of us let slip through the cracks amid the chaos. Do it before the workweek even starts. Take a little time on Sunday to map out your week, says Ramsey. It doesnt have to be anything fancy. It can just be a quick check of your priorities, projects, and goals. That way, when Monday comes, youre ready to go, instead of spending half the day figuring out what to do first. Then, during the workweek, program your day based on when youre at your peak. Everyone from an intern to a CEO experiences natural peaks and dips in energy throughout the day, explains Joe Galvin, chief research officer with Vistage, a Connecticut-based coaching organization. Some employees are sharpest in the early morning, while others do their best thinking in the afternoon, he says. The goal is to match your most demanding work, such as deep thinking, strategic planning, and creative problem-solving with your peak performance hours. Save lighter tasks for off-peak times. So, think about your own productivity and performance. Notice when tasks feel lighter and youre less distracted, adds Ramsey. This will probably be your best and most productive time period. Notice when you are most productive: A lot of people do a bad job of being aware. Being aware when you are tired, when you are energized, she explained. We do ourselves a favor when we recognize whats going on with ourselves. This can go a long way for productivity.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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