JOYFROOT
Applying design thinking to my small business
AT A GLANCE
Graphic Design, Product Design, Website Design
TYPE 💻
June - August 2023 (3 months), from the start of planning to shipping out my first product
TIMELINE 🕒
Canva, Figma, Procreate, Squarespace
TOOLS 🛠️
DESIGN THINKING
Discover
Learn and understand what matters to my audience—motivations, wants, and needs
Narrow design focus on user frustrations and tensions. Keep a user-first perspective
LAUNCHING MY SMALL BIZ
01 Purpose
Identify core values, skills, opportunity, and need.
Define
02 Plan
Conduct market research, develop business strategy, and gather materials. Get inspired!
Develop
Play with potential solutions. Trial experiences, test them with users, and implement feedback
03 Produce
Generate ideas and learn new software. Pursue feedback and iterate
Deliver
Launch the solution and stay curious about my users. Gather data and repeat the process
04 Plug
Launch products and establish presence in the market! Continue designing new product based on customer desirability
0 — 1
Dive into my process, from start to finish 🚀
01 PURPOSE
ikigai — defining the intersection between interest, skill, profit, and need
I didn’t have much direction when I first started JOYFROOT. Honestly, the business aspect terrified me, especially all the financial considerations I would need to take ownership over. However, when it came to establishing a framework for my planning and production process, I had an easier time defining what my focus was going to be. I came up with 2 main objectives—
* Establish an organic personal brand that reflects my voice as an evolving designer. This included other goals that fell under this category, such as (learning how to craft more compelling visions/stories) and (exercising creative agency in a relatively low-risk setting). At the start of my venture, I was far more concerned with attaching meaning and value to my shop than making huge profits, though later on I learned the importance of not underselling my work.
* Develop and maintain a profitable cushion for me to share my creative ideas with the community around me. I’m fortunate enough to have the time, energy, and resources to pour into a passion project. 365 days is neither short nor long, but being on a gap year, I was curious to see how I would grow if I dedicated this time to impact people through my ideas.
Returning to these key objectives throughout my journey proved to be helpful in maintaining clear perspective and focus as I explored a variety of outcomes. I then moved on to discover my purpose, or ikigai (a Japanese concept). Asking myself these 4 questions helped me to define what kind of brand I wanted to create.
so…what’s my purpose?
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I’m a huge advocate for mental health and am always striving to find ways I incorporate rest, practice more mindfulness, and create intentional paths to success. I care about creating safe spaces for people to be seen and sharing stories that resonate with people.
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I thrive when I have opportunities to design and make things with my hands. I’m a born visionary and find much fulfillment in setting intentions for creative ideas I bring to life. Friends and family have also told me I’m skilled with bringing beauty out of the mundane—another way of saying I can make things look pretty and pleasing to the eye.
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Probably some kind of physical product like stickers, jewelry, or pins! I don’t have much experience producing those, but I’ve heard the learning curve is pretty low (plus I was fortunate enough to have the time and resources to learn a new skill). I also thought about selling digital assets, like e-planner designs or printable wall prints, but ultimately decided I would enjoy the process of physically packing an order and shipping it out to a customer more than an impersonal transaction.
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The biggest need I saw in front of me was the need for rest—not just in the physical sense, but emotionally, socially, mentally, spiritually. People are chronically busy nowadays (I mean, let’s be real, hustle culture has been around since the beginning of time) and there’s always this unspoken pressure to do more and take on more commitments. “I don’t have time for rest.” It’s almost strange and rare to see someone taking their time eating at a sit-down restaurant, or slowly sipping on their coffee as they read a book. And as I reflected on my own goal of intentional rest for my gap year, I realized that I’m not so great at slowing down and prioritizing my health in this way—neither are the people around me.
To design and sell paper goods that encourage people to find outlets for experiencing joy and rest in the midst of busyness.
Diecut stickers
Diecuts are individual stickers that adhere to the original shape of the design. They’re typically sold as one unit, making it easy for customers to peel and stick them on any personal item, like laptops and water bottles. Most diecut stickers on the market are made from waterproof vinyl, a trusty material for longevity and durability. Many Etsy sellers, I observed, also offer options for personalized diecuts (i.e. your name for text-based stickers). Characters and quotes are two of the most common diecut subjects.
Themed sticker sheets
Sticker sheets, on the other hand, are collections of individual, small stickers on one sheet that usually relate to one another in some way. They’re often used as decor and embellishment in planners, on handwritten letters, phone cases, etc. These types of stickers uphold a good reputation in the sticker world simply due to value (multiple stickers at a lower price point) and just how irresistibly cute they are (I mean, just look at them—who doesn’t want a pack of flowers!)
What I’m going to design and sell
I realized there is much variability within the sticker market—you can sticker-fy just about anything! With this and the resources I’d have in mind, I decided to feature mostly diecut stickers and sticker sheets on my website and play with sticker subjects in my ideation phase, then expand my shop inventory as needed.
MY IDEA NOTEBOOK
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MY IDEA NOTEBOOK
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MY IDEA NOTEBOOK 〰️ MY IDEA NOTEBOOK 〰️
[ choosing a shop name, setting up my website, and visual branding ]
Choosing a shop name
Admittedly, the list of shop names I brainstormed existed before identifying my purpose. Because there weren’t any conceptual or thematic constraints, I believe this order of events actually enabled my mind greater ideation capacity when it came to putting pen on paper. My ideas didn’t have to make complete sense or check certain boxes. It also gave me an extensive bank of names to test and align with the purpose I defined earlier:
Referring to this statement helped me waste no time in narrowing down my options, and before I knew it, I had settled on the shop name, JOYFROOT.
The name JOYFROOT encapsulates the idea of how cultivating and living out of joy produces fruitful and satisfying outcomes.
To design and sell paper goods that encourage people to find outlets for experiencing joy and rest in the midst of busyness.
Basic sitemap for JOYFROOT
establishing visual identity
02 PLAN
the logistics & research
Etsy
FEATURES
To make my break into the sticker industry, I needed to 1] reference what already exists out there and 2] decide where I want to sell my stickers.
The sticker industry is heavily saturated—and I get why. Aside from the sheer number of people interested in buying and the affordability of the products, the barrier to selling stickers is relatively low, requiring just a few materials (many crafty people own already) to produce something of quality and desirability.
The #1 site for sticker shop owners to sell their products is none other than Etsy. Etsy is a go-to online marketplace for just about any handmade item, and buyers can browse categories spanning from Art & Collectibles to Clothing to Weddings. Etsy is filled with talented up-and-coming sticker shop owners that are competing for sales.
There are also quite a few small businesses that choose to sell their products via website hosts like Shopify or Squarespace. I didn’t know too many shop owners who sold their products on a personal website, though, so I conducted some research on both Etsy and Squarespace to see which platform could best suit my needs and goals for my business.
It was also helpful to consider my own priorities when it came to what I was looking for in a selling platform. My top 3 concerns were 1] the capacity for customization, 2] transaction and processing fees, and 3] providing a seamless, efficient checkout experience for the customer.
Squarespace
FEATURES
Pre-made templates
Unique third-party integrations (i.e. Stripe)
PROS
Control and customization of site design and functionality
Personal domain hosting
No processing fees
CONS
Steeper learning curve
No one knows you exist until you make it known (aka must spend more time and resources on marketing)
and the winner is…Squarespace
I decided to run my sticker shop using Squarespace, primarily for its wide array of website templates and customizability. I preferred being able to manage all aspects of my brand, including how my product listings are visually displayed on the website, and Squarespace would give me more creative agency to do so than Etsy. I wasn’t too worried about learning how to build my website (since I’ve had previous experience designing sites), and having verified partnerships with third-party payment processors minimized the pressure I felt in the financial oversight aspect.
market trend & analysis
Having a pretty, intuitive website is great and all, but the stickers I make need to appeal to my customers. To make sense of current trends in the sticker industry, I asked myself guiding questions such as what sells well, and what’s getting recommended to buyers? to serve as a basis for creating my own inventory of products to sell. So I took to Etsy and searched the keywords “cute stickers” to figure out what kind of stickers were popular with the type of crowd I wanted to attract. I found that diecuts and sticker sheets tend to sell well.
Built-in marketing tools
Messaging platform for customer inquiry/service
PROS
Beginner-friendly and easy shop setup
Visibility and discoverability
Ready-made audience
CONS
Overhead costs (listing/processing fees)
High competition
Limited options for shop personalization
examples of diecut stickers
examples of sticker sheets
Setting up my website
Before designing the stickers, I thought it’d be helpful to set a product quantity for my shop launch and map out an easy and user-friendly website layout. With the product thumbnails as the center of focus (and main page of interest), I structured the rest of the menu components around the images, hoping to create a natural flow of navigation for site visitors in my final iteration.
Other website pages
Aside from having a “Shop” page, I knew I wanted to provide a few other pages that would capture the full essence of my brand and deliver a beautiful user experience. These pages included:
LANDING / HOMEPAGE
ABOUT
BLOG / JOURNAL POSTS
FAQ
Typography
Squarespace offers typeface packs in tandem with their templates, making it easy to find a font pairing that matched the vision I had in mind. I was looking for a typeface that was simple yet warm. Familiar yet inspiring. Approachable and friendly. Something that wouldn’t distract from my stickers, but still invite curiosity.
Halyard Display fit the bill.
Color
Initially, I dreamed up a brighter, more vivid color palette in hopes of reflecting a youthful energy. It was a good effort, but I realized I wanted a theme that was an extension of my own personality and still speak to the “joy” part of my brand. I experimented using coolors and ultimately locked in on mellow reds (terracotta, blush, etc.) and a pistachio green, a pairing I came up with after translating JOYFROOT to Mandarin. A direct translation—“开心果“ [kai xin guo] would reveal 2 definitions: pistachio, and someone who emanates happiness to those around them. JOYFROOT’s mascot has since then become a blushing pistachio!
DESIGN
03 PRODUCE
Design
Draw sticker designs, then refine digitally via Procreate. Iterate and assign color.
where ideas come to life
L O G O D E S I G N
Once I determined the basics of my business, the next stage of planning was rather straightforward: DESIGN to PRODUCTION
CONFIGURE
CUT
Configure
Import designs into Cricut Design Space. Reposition and resize individual stickers as needed.
Stylize
The best part was seeing all the components come together…AKA the packaging. I spent much time gathering and sourcing materials (such as cardstock, designing the order receipt, the paperclips) I felt confident could deliver a pleasant experience for the customer. Practice packaging stickers just for fun :)
STYLIZE
Print & Cut
Print using sticker paper, inkjet printer, and Cricut machine. Reconfigure as needed.
04 PLUG
SHOP PAGE
SITE TRAFFIC
PRODUCT
(YTD — AUG to NOV)
reflections
I made my website live on August 25, 2023. Since then, JOYFROOT has attracted 800+ unique visitors and amassed over 1K site visits. Most of my customers find my website and have made sticker orders through the shop Instagram @joyfroot, which has a small following of around 160+.
Though the numbers aren’t anything special, I’ve gained so much fulfillment from friends messaging me about their friends who have browsed my shop, read my blog posts, and expressed how they resonate with the descriptions I’ve written to introduce each product I’m selling. I continue to measure the success of my shop by the very goals I set for my business from day one, but I’m keen on revising some of those goals as JOYFROOT evolves over time.
JOYFROOT started off as a sticker shop; however, many customers have expressed interest in purchasing merchandise. After about a month of packing sticker orders, I decided to pivot and expand my shop to start selling tees and tote bags as a response to customer wants and needs. Check out my merch here!
I’ve learned that the key to successfully maintaining the quality and integrity of my brand is to 1] remain curious and 2] test my curiosity
Not putting too much pressure on myself to scale my business allowed me to prioritize organic presence without fear of not profiting
Entrepreneurship doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it takes a village to make something great. I consulted friends quite often throughout the planning process, like asking my business friend for pricing strategies and determining the value of my designs
It was easy for me to spend hours on end ideating in my room all day, but I quickly realized the importance of staying inspired, taking breaks, and going out to experience the world so that my creative muscles would stay in shape
Not boxing myself in! I think there’s an unspoken pressure to stay within the realm of your existing work, but I’m starting to embrace the freedom that comes with being curious about new ideas and giving myself permission to step outside my comfort zone (a recurring challenge as a type 6, haha)
& takeaways
THANK YOU FOR READING UNTIL THE END ◡̈