Paper Planes
A machine learning SAAS product, brand, & launch. Maximize everyday retail management.
The platform that thinks for you
Turn customer data into intelligence, knowing what to produce, order, and sell, maximizing efficiency.
Phase 1: Discovery—
A young industry with a lot of potential for new technologies.
Competitive analysis
When researching direct competitors in the industry, we created a SWOT analysis for each and expanded into all cannabis technology sectors to understand the full scope of the supply chain and its flaws.
Product-market fit
Our detailed competitive discovery led us to find the specific technology gaps in the market where we can build a helpful solution. We call it "finding the spot no one is standing in."
Industry interviews
We also conducted comprehensive interviews with retail owners, managers, and employees to fully understand their current challenges, how to integrate improvements into existing workflows, and how to optimize employee operations.
Discovery overview
Overall, we spent about a year researching competitors, identifying industry gaps, and completing interviews. This approach was essential for understanding market demand and features needed before product design or pursuing funding.
The Challenge—
A highly regulated industry struggling to keep up with competitors and constantly changing inventory.
Problems
Inventory management is losing money.
Retailers must destroy expired products, adapt to constantly changing inventory, and compete with black market sales.
Sales decline and customer loss.
Retailers struggle to keep up with future demand, consumer targeting, and pairing the correct product to the proper customer.
Opportunities
Capture daily sales & inventory goals.
Focus on daily retail management and recommend products to sell at the correct times and at the highest value, maximizing sales.
Prioritize customer demand above all.
The customer is always right. Focus on being an expert on customer needs to inform all data and recommended actions.
Goals & Approach—
Data intelligence is just the start.
The goal is to seamlessly integrate advanced machine learning technologies into everyday management, replacing lengthy reports, analyses, and inventory updates with prioritized recommended actions. This AI data intelligence would replace hours of work with one-click actions so retailers can focus less on repetitive, time-consuming tasks and more on growing their business.
Phase 2: Branding—
An iconic logo that connects with the community and a visual identity ready to fly high.
"Paper planes" is a slang term for a rolled joint in the community. We wanted to avoid literal cannabis leaf visuals in the identity and add personality that touches on cannabis culture. The logo concept visualizes a "Paper Plane," with the center subtly being a rolled green joint. The strategic brand vision is to humanize cannabis with an innovative, empowering, friendly voice and a human, inclusive, and approachable tone.
We developed a brand that stands out against competitors and connects to the audience and culture. The graphic logo can stand alone and visually represent the brand in a clever, identifiable symbol. The brand's focus is being boldly visionary and always human-first, with these characteristics being the foundation for all design assets, including website landing pages, email campaigns, social media campaigns, presentations, and overall product design.
A mission to humanize cannabis
A brand focused on normalizing safe, legal cannabis use by creating a space where users feel understood and illustrate satisfied retail experiences.
Phase 3: Product Design—
A data intelligence product designed to suggest daily actions at the touch of a button.
Paper Planes is a SAAS platform with AI-driven suggested actions for daily retail management. I led the product design and collaborated with chief officers to seek funding and present prototype demos. Successfully built our data intelligence product, providing predictive actions, consumer segmenting, and a user-centered interface design. We architected the technology stack, API layer, data models, and normalization with the lead engineers across multiple data sources.
Design System—
Building a configurable product design system for a large-scale SAAS platform, ensuring scalability and cohesion.
Universal components
I created components, subcomponents, variants, and a typography system that are easily configurable while maintaining a consistent structure. They are designed to be automatically responsive for all desktop and mobile sizes.
Clear documentation
I developed a detailed guide listing all the product components, how to use the configuration system, how to translate components to code, and how to build off the foundational system to make new components.
Accessibility standards
It was essential to implement accessibility standards to ensure inclusivity and compliance. They enhance the overall experience while improving readability, navigation, and usability for all users, not just those with disabilities.
Shared ownership
When completing the design system, the engineering and design teams aligned on a collaborative system and ensured all components were represented the same in the Figma file, storybook instance, and associated documentation.
Phase 4: Launch—
Bringing our refined product design to life with seamless usability and innovation.
MVP product
We successfully launched an MVP. We worked closely with our development team to prioritize needed features and confirm what is possible within our timeline, budget, and limitations.
Pilot program
Our pilot program onboarded limited clients to utilize our SAAS product, train our machine learning models, identify priority features, and receive real-time feedback from users in the industry.
Website design
We launched the marketing website, strategizing product storytelling, designing unique supporting illustrations, and using humorous, approachable brand content. We also implemented accessibility standards across the website for improved usability for all.
Launch assets
In preparation for the product launch, we developed additional marketing assets including social media templates, marketing templates, email campaign templates, sales collateral, and branded company gifts (investor giveaways).
Cohesive & scalable marketing
A unified marketing design system that streamlines campaign launches and content creation while strengthening brand identity.
Results & Impact—
With stakeholders, we funded our pre-seed round to build the full MVP product. With our engineering team and data experts, our joint effort launched a private MVP pilot with limited clients to train the machine learning model and analyze the amount of time/money saved when using the product. Early results and feedback have shown quicker decision-making and immediate identification of first-out products.
Conclusion—
With Paper Planes, I have learned that knowledge is power and failure is a part of the process. A lengthy discovery and design phase was a lot of work, but it gave us the knowledge to identify market gaps and outline the feature sets needed. This led to insightful approaches to UI design, data-driven decision-making, and smooth requirements handoff to engineers. However, it is essential to remember that products constantly evolve, and failure is a part of the process. Research and knowledge can set you up for better approaches, but it's essential to allow for failure and to know what fails to learn and act on a better solution. Learn constantly and design fearlessly.
