To craft an innovative future vision for the Share2Pay service within Hollister stores, elevating the store experience and allowing customers to both stay happy and shop smart.
In 2022, our internal team introduced a new-to-market digital payment method for the Hollister brand called Share2Pay. This innovative payment tool was developed as a result of foundational insights showing teens had unique problems in their purchase journey.
While adults can shop and buy independently, teens often rely on their parent or guardians for purchase approval and payment, as they typically lack the means to pay themselves. This friction led teens to use their online shopping bags more like wish lists, waiting until they were in the same physical space as a parent to make a purchase. Share2Pay solved this problem.
Leadership wanted to capitalize on the success of Share2Pay and expand it to stores. To understand if there was an opportunity to solve this payment problem in a physical stores, we needed to do deep research to determine desireability, viability and feasibility. The catch was that we needed to learn, build and test before back-to-school kicked off.
We customized the approach to specifically meet the needs of this engagement, which was to focus solely on the Insight & Vision phases to ensure the violacity needed for an MVP pilot.
Insights: To gather deep insights, we applied a "Think Beyond" process to co-create the Share2Pay experience with existing Hollister customers. We recruited 6 parent & teen duos for an online community study. Participants we spoke to lived throughout the United States, had shopped at Hollister in the last 3 months, and expressed frustration when paying for teen clothes. Next, we gathered social comments from Hollister shoppers, looking for their biggest pain points. This exported data was then analyzed via Open AI to identify patterns.
Vision: Three key themes were distilled that were representative of both parents and teens—the pain that underscores them (pain points) and the opportunities they inspire. These themes and their "How Might We's" became the guiding principles for our ideation of an MVP for Share2Pay in-store, and framed the vision for it's future-state.
To nail down the happy path for an MVP pilot, we organized a core working team of cross-functional partners, (representing marketing, engineering, store-ops, data and analytics, and product management). Together we brainstormed ideas in co-create workshops, captured early thoughts, and validated our ideas against business goals and user needs. We eventually landed upon our "happy path". We met one final time to solidify MVP requirements and capture challenges/risks, before assiging team responsibilities, and agree upon the timeline to build out an MVP.
At the end of the engagement, we were able to successfully hand off our MVP journey concept, risk & solution assessment, timeline and visioning themes for future evolutions of teen and parent shared-purchasing experiences.
Assumption & Hypothesis
MVP Happy Path
New Deliverables & Flagged Challenges
Proposed Timeline by Function
Leadership was impressed with the collaborative ouptput, but based on the risk of launching this project so closely to back-to-school (one of our busiest season), the Share2Pay in-store MVP proof of concept was pushed off until later in Q1-2024.
The learnings, however, were invaluable to future explorations of teen shopping behaviors, their attitudes on shared-shopping, and friction within their unique journey.
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