The 40.000 children used to sell flowers on the streets for cash, but digitalization and covid-19 changed this for good. Majblomman needed help to invent new ways to sell flowers through digital payment systems and online stores.
AINO AGENCY
- Client
- Majblomman
- Work
- App
- Design
- UX
- E-commerce
- Cloud
- Development
- Sanity
Every spring since 1907, thousands of children sell flowers to collect money to fight child poverty in Sweden. The concept is called ”children helping children” and the first flower is traditionally sold to Her Majesty The Queen.
How do we get children to sell flowers online to an elderly audience? Children are no strangers to online transactions, but their audience might be. So we needed to not only build smart and engaging tools for the sellers, we also needed to create an extremely simple and user friendly store for the buyers that simluates the experience of purchasing directly from a child.
The idea was to give each child a personal e-commerce store as well as physical flowers for street sales. We then built a custom, real-time order management in the cloud that could handle massive amounts of transactions for both online and offline and let each child register through an app. From the app, they could promote their online store through messaging and social media and follow all sales in real-time.
Every time someone buys from their store or on the street, they get a push-notification and the buyer’s name gets listed in the app, together with their total earnings and tip. The flowers would then be either handed over directly or sent to their homes.
The system needed to be custom-built, since no one had done this before and the existing platforms didn’t support the extreme simplicity we wanted to achieve.
We built a native app to provide pocket-size tools for the young entrepeneurs. They use it to register, customize, promote and follow sales on the street and online.
Each child got their own webshop so they can sell flowers to relatives far away using a simple checkout process.
The child gets a notification on each sale so they can follow their progress in real-time!
When selling on the streets the buyer uses a QR-code to pay using the same order system.
When covid-19 hit, we had three months to digitalize their 100-year old income model.
Majblomman has a long tradition of being sold in person by children all over the country. Outside stores, schools, on the bus, children would find new ways to reach as many buyers as possible.
Covid-19 changed all this in just a few weeks, and Majblomman lost almost all of their income in the first year, with an uncertain future to come. But luckily, children are also adaptable and fast learners of new technology, so we saw our chance to fully digitalize their entire sales strategy in just a few months’ time.
When designing the e-commerce, we wanted to simulate the experience of buying on the streets as close as possible, so we needed to make the entire online experience as simple and frictionless as possible. Building a raw but functional prototype early was necessary to be able to adjust or change technology fast if we needed to.
The stores were designed to be super-simple, fast, and to the point. Every button had to make total sense and nothing without purpose was allowed in the interface. We had UX workshops and tried many different paths before we landed on this extremely simple idea, inspired by online food stores and other interfaces that the typical Majblomman buyer uses. As an example, we realized that we didn’t need a shopping cart, so we removed it. The site was the shopping cart. Insights like this helped us align the interface with our goals and think outside the box.
During the first 2 hours we had over 30.000 orders, sometimes coming in at a rate of 20 orders per second.
For the entire period, 750.000 orders were placed and 45.000 children sold flowers, collecting around 60.000.000 SEK in total. All funds will be used as financial aid for low-income families in Sweden.
