JOOR Product Development: Innovative Solutions to Industry Challenges

The JOOR Product team is respected across the industry for its unique approach to building new technologies. Our development philosophy is based on a series of principles every team member closely follows to keep JOOR true to its core aim—improving every aspect of wholesale buying and selling to help our users grow their businesses.

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We sat down with SVP of Product Management, Christiane Wruck, and Director of Product Management, Crystal Hu, to learn more about these driving principles and to hear how they were applied to our most recent product launch, JOOR Discover.

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JOOR Product Team Principles

Start with the Problem

“We start from a place of curiosity”, Christi says, “and we try to understand the heart of the problem and what our users and stakeholders are trying to accomplish. This helps us make sure we are solving the right problem, not just building exact feature requests.”

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Our team closely monitors industry trade publications, attends trade shows, and regularly speaks with brands and retailers to better understand their needs. The majority of requests come straight from these feedback sessions, where we can see firsthand how our platform is used and identify common pain points to be solved. 

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Evolution Over Parity

Working by the motto ‘innovation in service of our clients’, our team spends a large portion of our time monitoring JOOR data. “Looking through our usage data, we start to notice certain trends that line up and help support what we’re hearing in the media and what clients are telling us,” Crystal says. 

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When we identify a particular area in need of improvement, we will ship small features that chip away at the problem, rather than designing and building a complex solution and waiting a long time to ship it. This lets us improve the problem but also learn and adjust as we go. 

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Think Big, Start Small, Test Often

When a request is made, our team is guided by the principle of thinking big. “We always try to identify what is going to move the needle forward for our clients”, Christi says. 

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“In the landscape of our current economy, it’s always about how we can help them grow their business. Even our biggest, most successful clients want to grow their business. So that’s always our north star.”

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Rather than focusing on a fix that can solve an issue in the short term, our team examines the true core of a need in the market and then builds out a complete solution. Beginning with making small changes that can be implemented quickly, testing their effectiveness often and adjusting accordingly, our team are experts in iterative development. 

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Solutions should be Sustainable, Scalable, and Usable

An imperative to the JOOR product development process is that all solutions must be fit for sustained use. This final principle is a reminder that all solutions should be scalable, too, so that we can implement the improvement for all users as quickly as possible to ensure the best JOOR experience possible.

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Case Study: JOOR Discover

We received feedback from many brands that they were finding it very difficult to identify and connect with retailers that could help expand their distribution. Retailers were equally challenged by large amounts of outreach that didn’t match what they were looking for.

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Christi explains, “Our goal became to evolve our platform away from just being a place for our brands and retailers to connect with current customers, to a place where they could also easily explore and connect with new prospects. How could they see who else is out there?”

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The Problem: Needing Connections

It seemed that both brands and retailers had a challenge we were uniquely positioned to solve, thanks to JOOR’s exclusive retailer data and high-quality network.

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“We already had everyone in the same place; we just needed to set up a way for them to find each other more easily,” Christi explains, and so the first step for our team was six months of customer research. 

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Crystal details the process, “We had to understand what was out there already, and how we were going to position ourselves differently from competitors. What alternatives exist in the market today? Where were the gaps, and did we have an edge? We spoke with a lot of users about what their current solutions were, what they liked about them, and where they felt the solutions were missing the mark.”

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“We explored the traditional marketplace option”, she continues, “putting products up in a place where retailers can come and buy, but it felt like it wasn’t quite hitting home with our brands. When brands spoke about growing their business, they talked about wanting to do it in a much more strategic way than what was being offered in the market.” 

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The Evolution: Strategic Exploration

“A lot of the brands we spoke to had certain cities in mind that they wanted to expand to, they were very pointed about where they wanted to grow and how they wanted to grow. And that’s when it started to click for us”, Crystal says.

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Thinking Big: Harnessing Our Network

Our team knew that JOOR’s vast network already contained the discerning brands and vetted retailers each was seeking to connect with; however, we needed to develop the right way for users to explore the data and surface accurate results best suited to each brand’s particular expansion strategy—and so JOOR Discover was born.

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Starting Small: Optimizing & Refining

As a first step, our team examined the current tools on our platform and optimized them for exploration wherever possible. Christi describes the process, “We leaned in on the places where we already had tools that were lending themselves to this problem and we just started refining, updating and optimizing them.”

Searches were refined, filters were updated to be more comprehensive, and our Find New Retailers feature was given an updated, intuitive interface to make it easier for brands to browse our complete database.

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‍We then created entirely new tools to further help unlock growth opportunities, like creating the ability to send Outreach messages and a Prospect hub so users could easily manage, reply and follow up all in one place.

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“We asked retailers to input more data into the platform, including key buyer contact information, so their profiles would be more useful for brands trying to determine who was a good match for them”, says Crystal.

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“We also tried to pivot away from just being an alphabetical directory with very rigid logic. We updated the Find New Retailers page to be much more optimized for browsing. We exposed a lot more information about the retailers up front, so you could easily view their information without clicking through into their profile, saving time and creating a much more targeted approach.”

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Testing Often: The Results

User testing took more than a year in total and led to six or seven rounds of iterations with further changes to layout and content to make JOOR Discover as effective as possible. Each round of changes was based on feedback from users and on usage data.

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Christi says, “Usage data will always let us know how successful or unsuccessful a feature is performing. We build things iteratively to ensure we don't overbuild or underdevelop features. And sometimes usage surprises us!” 

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With JOOR Discover, beta testing usage data revealed that email open rates soared. “We were really nervous email open rates would be low,” Crystal says, “but what we found was that retailers were clicking into these emails a ton and found them super beneficial. Open rates have been fantastic! While we anticipated a potential barrier to adoption, our retailers were even more engaged than we anticipated.”

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Introducing a Sustainable Solution

JOOR Discover launched globally on February 18th and is already helping to bring more brands and buyers together than ever before. By simplifying the discovery and connection process, our community is unlocking new business and creating even more enduring partnerships.

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The proof is in the data—brands on JOOR are experiencing a 9x higher success rate acquiring new clients compared to traditional prospecting, with 78% of these new retail relationships ordering again and placing on average over 5 orders within the first year.

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Always Evolving

At JOOR, Product is a constant process of listening to the industry’s needs and evolving our software to meet them. We’re proud to be the B2B wholesale platform that is always innovating in the areas that best serve our community, and we’re excited to continue to ship new developments to help drive growth.

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Any retail business looking to grow its wholesale channel can benefit from JOOR Discover. Request your free demo today and explore the potential our platform can offer your business.

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