Aery is a platform that helps young adults conveniently and affordably personalize their living space while living in a busy lifestyle.
Goal:
What do Millennials & Gen. Z value about homes, and how is that related to their overall aspirations? What might help them obtain that value?
Project Duration:
September - December 2019 (15 weeks)
Role:
Research & Interview / Concept / Wireframe & Prototype / User Testing
/ Storytelling & Video Creation / Business & Marketing Strategy
Team:
Yuan Chen
Sophia Deng
Frank Gong
Bowen Shen
Advisors:
Kevin McElroy, Fjord
Roger Mader, Ampersand
Criswell Lappin, Bigtincan
mARKET RESEARCH
According to the Manpower group, young adults are working longer hours and moving a lot more frequently for new career opportunities. It is an upward trend that impacts the way young adults value homes. It also determines their home plan and the way they settle into their living spaces.
INTERVIEW
We interviewed a mixture of homeowners and renters who are entry-level employees or graduate school students. Most people did not plan to settle down anytime soon. We mapped our interviewees on a couple of spectrums to determine some of their current mindsets.
They aspire to excel in their career.
They are willing to sacrifice anything to the proximity of things that matter.
Young adults want to customize their personal space.
DEFINE PROBLEM
We saw a tension between the want to customize living spaces and the busy and financially conscious lifestyle habits of young adults. We divided the relocate process into six stages: discover & browse options, narrow down & make a decision, application process, moving in, living there, and moving out. The conflict happened in the second half: moving in, living there, and moving out.
Based on the research synthesis, we proposed our problem to solve:
DESIGN CONCEPT
TARGET USER
Young adults who are at the start of their career paths. They are moving a lot more frequently for new career opportunities. They spend most of their time working, do not have time to take care of their living space.
DEFINITION
Aery is a website platform that curates pre-owned items based on users’ tastes and needs, which allows young adults to conveniently and affordably personalize their living space.
INFORMATION
ARCHITECTURE
SKETCH IN PROGRESS
We made 2 rounds, 6 sets of prototypes.
The prototypes helped us choose the right platform, functions to consider, and so forth.
UI DESIGN
Business & Marketing Strategy
There are two main business-side strategic innovations in Aery supporting our user flow.
Partnership model
Aery will partner with furniture and home good companies. Through strategic partnering with up and coming brands, we have a wide array of diverse and high-quality sources of furniture and items, which enables us to offer accurate, unique, and “preference-first” personalization experience on our platform.
Product Circularity Model
Our guaranteed sell-back program empowers this circularity model. It allows us to profit and makes it easy for users to sell things they don’t want anymore.
The sell-back program guarantees the customer’s benefit. They will gain at least 65% of their money back when they sell items repurchased on our platform to us. So they can pay less money to enjoy higher-quality furniture and objects.
This model also helps us champion environmental sustainability in the furniture industry by reducing furniture waste.
Pilot
We chose for piloting in Austin, Texas. The city CONSISTENTLY has one of the highest rates of population growth in any US region. It's rapidly becoming an extremely urbanized city, coupled with the growing number of jobs. We must take the chance to lay roots here while the land is still abundant and cheap. And because of this, starting in Austin is an investment for us that will pay off and allow us to continue expanding in the years to come to other cities.
In general, we will spend around 4 years to prep before publicly launching the product. The Beta period will be a bit longer to account for a full cycle of buying and selling furniture.
To break it down:
At the stealth stage, we will build our platform.
Before heading to the beta stage, we will run several rounds internally to test the physical operating system for about a year.
Next, we plan for our beta stage to take three years. We’ll break-even during this time, around the 2nd year, due to our profit that comes from reselling furniture. During the 2nd Year of beta stage, we may need to sacrifice some profit to buy more storage space to store pre-owned furniture that is being sold back to us. But the cost will stabilize once this model runs a few cycles.
There’s a reason to invest in this project. We are hopeful that we can expand and fulfill our mission in many other places.