Young, urban fashion consumers actively search for sustainable options, but many find it challenging to figure out what factors constitute "sustainability." A recent McKinsey survey in the United Kingdom examined consumer sentiment about sustainability in clothing, footwear, and accessories. They found that millennials and Gen Zers are reaching the age and income levels to apply their eco-conscious values and beliefs to their wardrobes.

Fashion consumers seek sustainable options

Despite increased awareness about the importance of sustainability, the fashion industry’s environmental footprint remains substantial. Companies continue to create more products than they can sell, and over half of all fibre globally produced is polyester, which requires more energy for extraction and processing and lingers in the environment for a long time. But fashion companies will likely feel pressure to do more as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) transparency continues to grow.

The environmental footprint of the fashion industry

<ul><li>Twenty-five percent of respondents to the McKinsey survey showed that they are concerned about sustainability-related issues.</li><li>They prefer buying second-hand items and looking for environmentally friendly clothing.</li><li>They more likely consist of urban millennial women with moderate to high incomes.</li><li>They are most concerned with lowering GHG emissions, preserving natural habitats for animals and using renewable energy.</li><li>Fifty percent of the survey respondents were unsure about sustainability, and the last twenty-five percent were not interested in seeking sustainable fashion.</li></ul>

Sustainability seekers

There is no shared understanding among consumers or brands about what "sustainability" means, which features matter most, or where to find information about a particular brand's sustainability commitment. Fashion brands have an opportunity to deliver clear, direct information on their practices and effortless postpurchase options that consumers can use to reduce the impact of their fashion choices.

Consumers are confused about the term "sustainability"

<ul><li>24 percent of respondents said they go out of their way to buy products from sustainable brands</li><li>46 percent of consumers said they would want to purchase items that could be easily donated to charity.</li></ul> This finding highlights a fertile opportunity for the development of circular business models. To create more value for shoppers, brands can design their products to be repurposed. If this sustainable loop is well managed, it would lessen consumers’ dependence on entirely new products and reduce the fashion industry’s planetary impact.

The opportunity for circular fashion

fashion

Fashion & Beauty

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

In search of fashion’s sustainability seekers

GI is a legal label marking in which region a product comes from. GIs can be domestic or international. Domestic GIs are protected by local governments and international GIs are protected by the TRIPS agreement, which is part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Once a GI status is approved, the label functions similar to trademarks.

Geographical indication (GI)

<ul><li>Consumers: GIs act as a quality guarantee that meets certain production standards.</li><li>Producers: GIs can help local communities to invest in their unique production process and raise prices.</li></ul>

GIs can benefit consumers and producers

Legal labels that mark where a product is from can be big business for local food producers.

food

Food

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

What the heck is a geographical indication?

SaaS onboarding often takes about two weeks. The first week is for completing forms and collecting information, and the second week is for training and walkthroughs. Consider what elements your onboarding should include and plot them on a timeline—for example, welcome messages, product walk-throughs, and guided tutorials. Always be proactive. Don't let people wait for your next email, message, or call.

Create an onboarding schedule

Your SaaS product likely has many exciting features. To avoid overloading your customers with information, focus on two or three of the most valuable features to help customers see immediate results with your app. Consider the "time to value" metric when creating your SaaS onboarding checklist.

Identify the key features you want to highlight

Include an easy and achievable task your customers can do during onboarding. Consider guiding them through the task with call-outs and flags. Quick wins show customers immediate value and help them reach a milestone they can celebrate.

Provide a quick and achievable task

The onboarding process is where customers learn to use your product, so they'll likely have questions or comments. Make it easy for them to get in touch so they don't disengage and leave. Build touchpoints into your SaaS onboarding checklist where you can reach out to offer support. For example, emails, in-app messages, or phone calls.

Offer many opportunities for support

Some customer segments will require extra support and education. To help customers feel supported, point out during your onboarding process that additional materials are available to customers, such as detailed user guides, community forums, and more.  Conducting a customer success check after the onboarding process can help to answer burning questions and get valuable feedback. This can be a call or online survey.

Provide additional ways to find value

Your SaaS onboarding checklist may feel essential to you, but many customers will find it a burden.  Offer them a chance to exit at specific points so that they can continue to use the product how they prefer. Check-in periodically to offer support and point them to DIY resources.

Give customers a way out

All the things you need to better the most important part of your customer journey. 

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

communication

Communication

Onboarding Matters

Effective customer onboarding is vital in a SaaS business as it helps to educate customers on using the product and help them see the value. An onboarding checklist can help to set customers up for success.

A SaaS onboarding checklist ensures you keep customers happy, empowers them with knowledge, and maximizes the use of your product.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

startup

Startups

product

Product & Design

How to create an effective SaaS onboarding checklist | The Jotform Blog

Probably we can’t all build $100B+ SaaS companies. But it’s becoming more possible:&nbsp;<ul><li>Go long in customer success and drive net revenue retention up to 130%.&nbsp;</li><li>If you go upmarket, keep going, as there is no ceiling.</li><li>Stay focused in the early days. Later, consider a second product.</li></ul>

Build a $100B+ SaaS company

The more products you sell, the more problems you solve, the more you make. The more big problems you solve, the much more you make. So keep adding value.

You may need a second product to go big

Today, there is 1 $100B+ SaaS Company, Salesforce. Just one. We could add older companies like Adobe, Microsoft, etc. but they aren’t pure SaaS plays. Salesforce is the “only” $100b+ pure-play SaaS…

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

How to Build a $100 Billion SaaS Company

<ul><li>As a Saas PM, look at a problem carefully from all angles to pave the right path forward. When a PM can go on vacation and trust the team to make the right decisions for the customer, that’s success in my book. It means that the PM has done a great job of communicating the problem and metrics of success for that project.</li><li>Focus on Data and The AARRR framework is always a solid starting point: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. For example, take the referral.&nbsp;</li><li>Always talk to your customers and never treat them as a number or a dollar sign＄.</li></ul>

Evan Michner

On measuring success:<ul><li>Overall client sentiment. Are clients seeing value in the platform? Are we solving an actual problem for them? Are we easily replaceable?&nbsp;</li><li>Client retention&nbsp;</li><li>Overall platform usage. How often are clients logging in and using key features?&nbsp;</li><li>Monthly recurring revenue. How much money are you making from the platform?&nbsp;</li><li>Feature-specific adoption.</li></ul>To avoid failure there should be a passion for your product, If you don't care about the product or clients you're building for, move on to a different role!

Jill Renwick

<ul><li>Funnel and segmentation analysis is key to SaaS product optimization. Focus on understanding data more generally and teach yourself how to write SQL queries. These skills will pay off tenfold.</li><li>A healthy Saas funnel is one that has a low and sustainable Churn rate with customers who are promoters.&nbsp;</li><li>Metrics: For the web, focus on net promoter score (NPS) and its trend over time, broken down by customer segment and persona type. For mobile, look at weekly retention rates by cohort to ensure we’re keeping new app users engaged over time.</li></ul>

Ramin Shokrizadeh

<ul><li>Every release must be Easy-To-Use, provide value for your customers, and not frustrate them.&nbsp;</li><li>Always ask questions, don’t make assumptions, and do research to make the right decisions for your product area.</li><li>While getting metrics on the product is always key, it’s important to remember ‘the why.’ Why are your customers using the product this way? How are they using the product to do whatever they need to do? Getting data is one thing; understanding the data and your customers is another.</li></ul>

Allison Burnett

<ul><li>Stay sharp with technology and have a Holistic view of Technologies around you. Your goal should be to offer an end-to-end experience.</li><li>Measure success with profitability and cash growth. A general rule of thumb is if your LTV is at least four times your CAC, you can recover the CAC in less than a year. It varies though and is not a hard-and-fast rule.</li><li>Build it and they will come. You can build the biggest thing ever and end up with the biggest failure ever. You’re not going to build something 100% right. 80% (or even less sometimes) is good enough.</li></ul>

Olexandr Prokhorenko

<ul><li>Track the number of meaningful customer contacts each PM has per week. It fundamentally changes PM behavior.</li></ul>

Sue Raisty

A team could deliver more value to customers by shipping the first version than by sitting around perfecting it. Cast the vision, build the version. Keep iterating, keep shipping!

The rise of the SaaS model in the product space has been swift, to say the least. So as product managers, knowing how to manage only traditional, on-premises software no longer cuts it. We chatted…

SaaS product management explained by 6 product managers

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are absolute table stakes for any Customer Success strategy. I’ve written <a href="https://csm-coach.com/6-things-that-make-great-qbr/" target="_self">before</a>, about the importance of QBRs and over time, the QBR remains the mainstay of assuring the value is delivered to your customers. What’s interesting about the QBR practice is the various ways that they are performed and what they may not include.

3 Tips to Up your QBR Game

SMART goals are goals that are:Specific: Stick with clear and well-defined goalsMeasurable: Ensure that the goal has a meaningful outcome that can be tracked/reported.Achievable: The goals you set with your customer must be attainable with minimal dependencies.Relevant: The goal must be in line with what your company does.Time-bound: Because your QBRs are…quarterly…try for deliverables and goals that can be achieved during that time frame (or faster).

1. SMART Goals

Considering that your QBR is a report card of sorts that is full of goal attainment reports and new goal establishment, this is not the time for surprises. You’ll likely have key stakeholders at your account in the meeting with you. Ensure that you’ve reviewed as many data points about the account before your meeting. Check things like:<ul><li>Account notes&nbsp;</li><li>Support case history&nbsp;</li><li>Usage data&nbsp;</li><li>NPS/CSAT or other survey data&nbsp;</li><li>Escalated account history&nbsp;</li><li>Open project plans&nbsp;</li></ul>

2. Research

Document, document, document. And document some more! Leverage your company’s CRM tool as much as you can. If you find that doesn’t work have a look at Evernote to see if it might meet your needs.Do what you say, say what you’ll do: This seems self-explanatory, but it’s easy to get distracted and forget to deliver on something that was promised. Don’t drop the ball on this one, delivery impacts your credibility with your customers.

3. Follow Through

This is a guest post by Keri Keeling. Keri is a results-driven Customer Success leader with deep experience in helping SaaS vendors build and grow their Customer Success team’s operations and…

Basecamp 3 is one year old and we’re celebrating with the most significant update since launch last fall. It’s available now in the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1015603248" target="_self">App Store </a>! Here’s a quick look at what’s new…&nbsp;

What’s new in Basecamp 3.3 for iOS

<a href="https://basecamp.com/">Basecamp 3</a> is also available on <a href="https://basecamp.com/3/via">Android, Mac, and Windows</a> — anywhere you’ve got a web browser and an internet connection.

Basecamp 3 is one year old and we’re celebrating with the most significant update since launch last fall. It’s available now in the App Store! Here’s a quick look at what’s new… Basecamp 3 is also…

Klaviyo is a perfect example of efficient entrepreneurship — the fact that the company has sustained aggressive growth rates without relying on venture capital makes them an interesting case study. How did they do it?

Efficient Entrepreneurship

Ed Hallen and his Co-Founder Andrew Bialecki spent their first nine months experimenting with ideas about how to make Email better. They quickly Honed in on an opportunity: it was possible to make Email more meaningful to the end user. Getting customer data on things like purchase history or Website behavior Synced with your marketing platform took a lot of time and money. So they focused on solving the hard engineering problems of creating reliable, real-time

What You Do Is Important — How You Do It Matters Even More

Klaviyo decided from day one to offer reporting that went above and beyond the traditional Email Metrics everyone else was using. This meant building Attribution Algorithms into their software, which they knew people were looking for.

Make the Value of Your Product Really Obvious

The early days of a startup are often marked by fitful experimentation to find the right path. This should be done with as small a team as possible. One or two people should be able to figure out what the company should be doing, before hiring a team.

You Don’t Need Eight (Or Eighty!) People to Experiment

Hallen and Bialecki waited until they were on a million dollar run rate before hiring anyone else. They handled everything themselves and constantly looking for opportunities to automate. "many of our best insights came from talking or working directly with customers," says Hallen.

Make a Million Dollars Before You Hire Employee #1

"our business was growing so quickly we couldn't keep up," says Hallen. "when hiring, never settle. Only hire people who will be as passionate as you," says Bialecki. "they’ll never let you down," says Hallen.

Hire People That Amaze You

Google returns two stories on the company Klaviyo. The company raised $1.5M in seed funding in August of 2015. it's not the first time the company has raised more than $1.5 million in funding. It's also the first time a startup has had to hire dozens of employees at the same time. A Raccoon-Infested office in a Co-Working space at MIT sparked a Furry friendlier relationship with a Raccoon.

The Bad Side of Bootstrapping

Hallen says if you’re not solving a real problem, for lots of customers, repeatedly, anything else is a waste of time. Focus on creating a great product that solves a real problem first, and the business will follow. We are now accepting submissions and happy to discuss advertising& Sponsorship opportunities.

The Bottom Line: Be Relentless in Your Focus

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that lets ecommerce companies use their own data to power more personalized marketing. Sound a little boring? That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

How to Bootstrap Your SaaS Company to $1M ARR Before Raising Venture Capital

Basecamp 3 has a ton of improvements on the iOS and Android side as well, this post will focus on some of the larger improvements to the web/desktop version.&nbsp;We start with focus mode:Need to do some deep work? Go into Focus Mode. This will turn off all notifications, and hide all unread badges.&nbsp;

Focus Mode

Lots of requests for this one. Now you can color and highlight your text in messages, automatic check-in answers, comments, to-dos, etc. Basically anywhere you can turn text bold, italic, etc, you can now also color it up.&nbsp;

Color and highlight your text

Big one. No matter where you are, hit COMMAND-J (Mac) or CONTROL-J (windows) and you’ll pull up the quick switcher. Just start typing to filter down and jump to another project, team, recently visited page (a to-do list, a message, a file/document, etc), your HQ, your assignments, your drafts, or other people.&nbsp;

Quick jump to projects, teams, recently visited pages, and people

Prior to this update, if you were @mentioned on a thread where a new message or comment was posted, you might get two notifications: One for the posting itself, and another letting you know you were mentioned in the posting. We’ve collapsed those two notifications into a single one. Now you’ll only get the @mention. This is better.

No more duplicated notifications on @mentions

Now, when you copy a Basecamp 3 URL and paste it into a Basecamp 3 message, comment, or document, we’ll automatically link it up using the title of the page as the link text.&nbsp;

Automatic titles for Basecamp 3 links

There’s a new link on the home page below My Assignments and My Bookmarks called My Schedule. Click on that and you’ll see every upcoming event that you’re associated with.&nbsp;

My Schedule

Major workflow improvement: Now you can shift-select multiple to-dos on a list and move or copy them together to another list.&nbsp;

Bulk to-do move and copy

When we launched Basecamp 3, all teams and projects were shown as cards. We recently pushed an update which allows you to view teams and projects in a list format. You can control teams and projects independently — teams can remain cards while projects can be shown as a list, etc.&nbsp;

Added list view to the home page

Now when you invite people to Basecamp, you can include a personal note. It’s a great way to explain why you’re inviting someone, or give them a short introduction to Basecamp itself.&nbsp;

Add a personal note to invitations

This one’s really useful: Now you can specify what kind of message you’re posting. You’ll see a series of options at the top of the “New Message” screen. If you pick one, the emoji will precede the message subject, making it more obvious from the start what kind of thing you’re publishing.&nbsp;

Message types

Just click the little smiley on the right side of the Campfire or Ping text entry box and you’ll see a panel with common emojis you can pop right into your message. You can always use any emoji you’d like — even ones not represented here — but this provides quick access to the most common ones.&nbsp;

All-new emoji picker for Campfires and Pings

Basecamp 3’s automatic Check-Ins feature has been a game Changer for so many of our customers. Originally we only provided a few recurring options — every Monday, every Friday, every other week, etc.

Flexible scheduling for Automatic Check-ins

We’ve been plugging away this summer on a wide variety of improvements on Basecamp 3. While there have been a ton of improvements on the iOS and Android side as well, this post will focus on some of…

Lots of new Basecamp 3 stuff

Plastic is made of natural gas, fossil fuels and byproducts of crude oil, and is used so widely that it is causing havoc to wildlife, air, water, land, plants and humans. <ul><li>Though recycling may not have many of its advertised benefits, it does help reduce plastic production to some extent.&nbsp;</li><li>The people making plastic are not telling the gullible public about the gravity of the problem and what steps to take.</li></ul>

Plastic Is Evil

The three arrows chasing each other symbol on most plastic products means it is made of plastic resin, and not that it is recycle friendly. Plastics embossed with the numbers 1 and 2 can be recycled, but 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 may not be recyclable.

Arrows And Numbers

Bioplastics are made from plant material instead of fossil fuels creating an impression that they are biodegradable. That is misleading, as they are chemically just like traditional plastic with the same waste problems.

Bioplastics 

Biodegradable plastics are dangerous to the environment, as they degrade into microplastics, being pushed into soil, water and food. Compostable plastic isn’t the same thing as organic waste(banana peels and eggshells) but an entirely different entity that needs to be recycled.

Compostable Plastic

If recycling plastic is a headache, one can avoid plastics altogether by using glass, cloth, cardboard and ceramics.<ul><li>We as individuals make up a tiny fraction of plastic consumption.</li><li>It is the corporations that produce dangerous plastic in insanely large quantities for packaging and shipping products.</li><li>We need to support companies that truly care for the environment.</li></ul>

The Plastic Menace

The numbers on plastic products can be hard to understand, and so can other terms such as "bioplastic." Read this guide to sort them out.

In search of fashion’s sustainability seekers

What the heck is a geographical indication?

How to create an effective SaaS onboarding checklist | The Jotform Blog

How to Build a $100 Billion SaaS Company

SaaS product management explained by 6 product managers

Victoria Kelly