Mapamundi is a unique store with a lot of potential that needed to build confidence through structure and foresight. Through our Operational Initiative we created a strategy that plans to approach growth from the perspectives of marketing, maintenance and management calls.
Etta + Billie is a natural body care company founded and led by Alana Rivera, selling beautiful, high-quality soaps, scrubs, lotions and other goods and based in San Francisco, California. Our team from the California College of the Arts MBA in Design Strategy program was tasked with analyzing opportunities for Alana’s operations based on several months of research. While Alana has already delineated a clear strategic vision for the company, we focused on analyzing Etta + Billie’s overall production capacity. This research aligns key opportunities in order to focus Etta + Billie’s efforts on increasing capabilities to enable and scale capacity necessary to support aggressive revenue targets through 2020. The opportunities identified in this report are presented in a phased approach and include recommendations for managing Etta + Billie’s capacity expansion for revenue growth. Other important components in this approach include balancing wholesale relationships and accommodating product constraints that ac…
Bert’s Bites is an artisanal food company, founded by Roberta Intrater, offering a uniquely blended snack of oats, corn flakes, almonds, and dried cranberries. Unlike its competitors, Bert’s Bites is handmade in San Francisco, sourcing only the best ingredients made to perfection using Roberta’s own recipe. Our vision for Roberta and Bert’s Bites is to develop Bert’s Bites into a company with a revenue of at least $90,000 annually within 3 years, in order to operate with the proposed co-packer model paired with an office staff to support Roberta’s operations. We designed an operations plan to help grow and sustain Bert's Bites by concentrating on the the following key areas: Outsourcing to CoPacker Model, Increasing Brand Valuation, Restructure through Organizational Design. Our recommendations include: implementing a dashboard tool for hiring, internal organization metrics, and costs; a three phased approach to entering to a copacker model, and streamlining how communications and marketing occur.
Five and Diamond, a small niche fashion store in the heart of San Francisco, caters to a wide array of fringe fashion enthusiasts and lifestyles. Though technology is a big influence in the bay area, Five and Diamond pushes back with alternatives to the conformity around us. The unique taste and experience that Five and Diamond sells and delivers to their customers is thanks to the current owner of Five and Diamond, Haley Kozlicki. She decides what the store carries, the tone it sets and the people that she works with.
Medlock Ames provided the problem statement that their club membership growth was plateauing but the winery needed to continue to increase sales. The areas of focus they suggested were increasing brand awareness through social media and increasing visitation to their winery to increase sales and membership sign ups. After reviewing their financial data, interviewing employees and customers, and conducting a quantitative survey with over 360 wine club members, we discovered areas that could give consumers more of what they wanted and improve the company financials. These included a greater variety of events, optimization of their sales spaces, different communications focuses, and improved cash conversion cycle and grape varietal allocation in their products.
Urban FarmGirls is a San Francisco company that specializes in sustainable garden design, maintenance, and gardening products. Presently, UFG’s small staff of five employees is led by CEO and founder Tina Calloway. Our Operations team consists of four students from the Design Strategy MBA program at the California College of Arts; Nick Brooks, Kaavya Krishnan, Changlin Liu, and Amodini Chhabra. We have worked directly with Tina and her staff from August through December of 2016 to identify and address operational initiatives that will benefit the success and longevity of the Urban FarmGirls. There are four main areas of focus which our team aimed to address. Firstly, restructuring Tina’s time and responsibilities. As it stands, Tina is deeply involved at nearly every stage of her business. She has admitted that she is currently pushed beyond her comfortable limits at UFG, but does not know how to get ahead of things as opposed to constantly putting out small fires. Redistributing her managerial responsibilit…
The Workshop Residence team is dedicated to furthering the exposure of local artists and craftsmen as a studio space and retail outlet, workshop host and event space. Although the team is dedicated to local artistry betterment, Workshop Residence also strives to become a thriving part of the local economy. Since its founding, Workshop Residence’s altruistic nature has supported featured artists no matter the cost. Moving forward, however, necessitates the establishment of profitable business practices across all three tiers of their offering: local artist retail, workshops, and events. We believe focusing efforts toward a structured retail strategy will assist greatly in improving Workshop Residence’s profit margins. Combined with a structured financial model and inventory tracking system, Workshop Residence has clear opportunity to move into profitable operation. The DMBA student team consisting of Zoé Bezpalko, Leticia Murray, Kwan Komain, and Alida Draudt will consult on one main initiative comprised of …