Good Sammy, Perth WA

Innovating customer experiences for Good Sammy’s online and physical retail spaces

This project with Good Sammy looks to expand the customer base, increase spending, enhance the customer experience, and understand product range demand. Additionally, it seeks to attract higher quality donations and reduce anti-social behaviors such as illegal dumping and scavenging. A key component includes rethinking the shared toddler and parent discovery space to better meet the needs of both Good Sammy and its audience.

Introduction

The WA based organisation - Good Sammy, faces the threat of remaining relevant even in the face of the informal reuse economy. Good Sammy seeked our assistance to leverage our creative perspectives and multi-disciplinary expertise in addressing their current challenges. Our involvement aims to enhance their market share, customer experience, and overall operational efficiency while reinforcing their mission of creating employment opportunities for people with disabilities.

Scroll down to read more about the project, or download the in-depth case study by clicking the button below.

Initial scope of the project

Project overview

Good Sammy can be classified as a wicked problem due to its multifaceted nature, involving various interconnected challenges across governance, economic, environmental, social, and infrastructural/technological domains. Addressing these problems required a comprehensive and human-centered approach.

The initial project problem

The initial project problem that Good Sammy presented us with contained key terms such as ‘informal reuse economy’ and ‘share economy’. These terms were unfamiliar to many of the team members. To better understand Good Sammy’s challenges, the problem statement was simplified into two sub-research questions:

How to expand our customer base, increase spend, enhance customer experience, understand product range demand?
How to attract more of the right quality of donations, and reduce anti-social behaviours such as illegal dumping & scavenging?

The Design Process

What we discovered through our research

Through research, interviews, and workshops, we discovered that the problem extends beyond governance issues. It encompasses addressing economic challenges such as excessive unwanted donations, low sales, and marketing issues. Environmental challenges like illegal dumping, excessive carbon footprints, pollution from transportation, short product life cycles, and non-biodegradable products also need to be tackled.

Furthermore, social challenges such as stigma around second-hand clothing, lack of customer behaviour data, inadequate research on social attitudes towards buying clothes, increased violence in operational areas, and seasonal changes in fashion trends must be addressed. Infrastructural and technological challenges, including lack of infrastructure to handle high volumes of donations, inefficient exporting and importing processes, e-commerce limitations, inadequate work environment and staffing, and organizational inefficiencies, also need to be considered.

Therefore, we have redefined the project problem as a comprehensive effort to address the multifaceted challenges faced by Good Sammy, encompassing governance, economic, environmental, social, and infrastructural/technological aspects, to ensure the organization’s long-term sustainability and impact.

Understanding the people affected by the project

Identifying key stakeholder groups is crucial for gathering diverse perspectives and experiences. For the Good Sammy project, we have identified several stakeholder groups that are essential to understanding the dynamics of second-hand shopping and donations. These groups will provide insights into different aspects of the customer experience, including motivations, behaviors, challenges, and opportunities. These groups included regular customers, donors, first-time visitors.

By engaging with these groups through interviews and observations at different locations, we aimed to gather valuable insights that will inform our understanding of the Good Sammy customer experience and help identify areas for improvement and innovation.

Clarifying the project problems

To summarise the key themes across our interviews the team focused on three key questions:

What is in place and working?

Yellow bag council trial; Good shopping experience in regard to customer service from the staff; Sustainability conscious; Updating fashion at a low cost; Positive attitude towards disability employment; Positive reinforcement (feels good to donate); and Has a better market presence (compared to salvos).

What is in place and not working?

Community donation bins (considered scary and unsafe); Females more than males (customer base); Negative experience having donations turned away; Hard to organise/find appropriate sizes; Misconceptions around pricing and durability; and Concerns about clothing quality.

What is not in place and needs to be working?

Positive donation experience; Clarified messages about Good Sammy and reuse retail; Efficiency in purchasing; Clear information about what donations are accepted; Lack of public awareness amongst visitors and international students; Cultural beliefs and stigmas (more influence & awareness); Changing mindsets towards reuse economy; Awareness & marketing needed; Better pricing in retailers (Kmart) compared to second hand; Store consistency; and Donation and clothing swap events.

Generating ideas and concepts to help

These empathy-driven methodologies facilitated creative exploration. By grounding our design thinking process in stakeholder experiences, we fostered a deep sense of empathy and understanding within our team. This allowed us to brainstorm innovative ideas that were not only technically feasible but also deeply resonant with the realities of those we served. Our designs were therefore more likely to be embraced and adopted by stakeholders, leading to greater impact and success.

What we created ...

A Supportive and Holistic System

Our research data suggests that sustainability, convenience and quality are key factors which influence customer and donor behaviour. From our research interviews we received key feedback concerning what should be implemented across the Good Sammy organisation:

Create a mobile app that allows customers to browse inventory, make purchases, schedule donation pickups, and receive promotions or loyalty rewards.
Implement self-service kiosks in stores to allow for faster checkout and reduce wait times, improving customer convenience.
Implement a robust inventory management system that tracks donations, sorts of items efficiently, and optimizes pricing based on real-time data.
Upgrade the POS system to streamline transactions, offer contactless payment options, and collect valuable customer data (with proper consent) for targeted marketing campaigns.

Further key designs are explained in detail below.

A Co-designed Pilot Store

This concept explores the possibility of setting up a store in the Good Sammy chain that would serve as an environment for testing out new layout and operational concepts. It would engage in live feedback and allow for a more efficient exchange of ideas i.e., rapid prototyping.

A way to gather ethnographic data – not just feedback, but a collaborative input, a co-design system. Asking Good Sammy’s customers (or potential customers) what they wish for, want and like in their op-shopping/donation experience. This is a way of first discovering and then giving the customers what they want. Co-designing with the community means listening to their input when designing new organisation aspects, touchpoints etc.

Tech Refurbishment - E-Waste

It’s no secret that the technology industry is booming, yet it also has a terrible environmental impact, with e-Waste being responsible for 70% of the toxic chemicals in landfill, which makes sense, as there’s over 140,000 tonnes of e-waste produced annually in Australia, and less than 1% of TVs and 10% of computers are actually recycled in Australia (Clean Up Australia, 2024).
This, coupled with the rising costs of living and the necessity for technological connection creates an opportunity for Good Sammy to expand into technological services as a means of encouraging the reuse of tech and offering higher value items to their customers at the same time.

To provide secure means to donate e-Waste, a new variation of bin could be developed, with a bagging station to separate and label the different donations.

Donation Incentives

The donation incentives concept refers to benefits that donors receive in return for making contributions to Good Sammy stores through the form of donating valuable items. Donors can receive points and rewards for donating valuable items. Good Sammy may also contact donors to inform them of the items they’re currently in need of, offering higher rewards for these in-demand items. This concept can be compared to what ‘containers for change’ offers, however, Good Sammy will offer incentives and rewards to be redeemed in store.

Offering extra incentives to donors for the quality of their donations can lead to an increase in high quality donations and added motivation to shop in Good Sammy stores.

What happens next ...

Continuous collaborative design is needed

Over the course of the next phase, we will continue to work with and investigate related projects with Good Sammy, to understand the methods behind their work and how this can be applied to our project. There will be more of an emphasis on co-design workshops with Good Sammy and other stakeholders that we have identified through our research. Our main objective, however, will be to develop and prototype the final concepts and do user-testing to see how they work in a real-world situation with those who will actually be interacting with the holistic system. From this we will be able to make iterations based on feedback, and hopefully create an organisational system that effectively achieves the critical goals of this project including expanding the customer base, increase spending, enhance customer experience, understand product range demand, attract more of the right quality of donations, and reduce anti-social behaviours such as illegal dumping & scavenging.