The other despair period
Years ago, I wrote about the despair period, my term for the very beginning of a creative project where I spend about an hour staring at the wall, processing what I’ve gotten myself into, and mostly just touching the void like regular people do. The despair period is necessary. One needs to reckon with the thing, and one needs to start picking the problem apart in their unconscious. This is preparation for the act. It is not optional. The despair period will find a way to make itself non-optional.
I think there is a second form of the despair period: one that may come at a specific roadblock, instead of at the very beginning. Instead of voidstaring, though, the answer to roadblocks, at least for me, is to write through them.
A few bits of text ago, I wrung my hands a little about who my next book, Store Design, is for. Yet this is a bit of a fakeout. The audience reveals itself over the course of the first draft, and now the first draft is essentially done. Now, there is effectively no longer any room for structurally repositioning the text: do so, and the text as it exists ceases to be relevant. This would mandate a wholesale rewrite. I am not going to do that. I respect myself and want to be happy.
So why write that text in the first place? Because I was in something energetically like a despair period, wondering how to write the marketing page, and I needed to untangle a knot of thoughts about it. The best way to do that is to write.
A couple of you replied, wondering, well, if you’re already this far along, don’t you already know? And, well, fair. In my heart of hearts I know who the text is for. What am I afraid of? Am I worried that market is no longer wallet-out? Or am I worried that I’m preaching to the converted, and they don’t need the text? Or am I afraid of the real thing, which is that I might not find new prospective clients from writing this?
The addressable market of Draft is shrinking, because ecommerce is slowly collapsing. Despite the fact that people still are buying things, the market is being captured by fewer players. Fifteen retailers account for about a third of Stateside online sales; Amazon alone accounts for another third. Because all sixteen of these businesses already understand the practice of store design on a deep, structural level, they are collectively increasing their market share over time, and the overall pie is not increasing at a fast enough rate to offset the impact.
Amazon understands store design more than any of them, because Amazon cultivates a singleminded focus on customer needs, with mandates from the top of the organization. Do customers want fast checkout? Remove all barriers to checkout, and continuously QA it. Do customers want easy search? Make search the primary element on all pages; don’t mess with it beyond smarter autocomplete. Do customers say they want free two-day shipping? Spin up a membership program that offers this as a benefit, and then create a comprehensive distribution network to eliminate dependency on third parties.
All of these strategic decisions are the result of correctly practicing store design. In each case, the business listened to customer needs, and did what they could to respond. In doing so, they continue to capture more of the entire online market, across most of western civilization.
If this concerns you, it should. I don’t like effectively one company understanding how to practice store design, and I especially don’t like one company capturing an entire third of online purchases in order to be a terrible employer and sell us more junk. Fortunately, store design is a power that anyone can use, at any scale, with any resources.
I spent a lot of 2022 feeling misunderstood by my own industry. I questioned my worth & skills as prospective clients kept asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. I felt denigrated by the people who did hire me. I barely scraped by while fighting burnout at the end of the year. I suspect Store Design is the final thing I will have to say as a practitioner within ecommerce. Either you understand the necessity to focus on customer needs and the sacrifices that may personally require, or you don’t. Perhaps that means Store Design is for only those who already understand store design.
No matter what happens when Store Design preorders open in three weeks, I’m glad I wrote through it.