Executive Summary
One of the key challenges to every brick and mortar store is to communicate with their customers. Whether it is to entice them to enter the store or restaurant, or communicate something while they are inside, there are a wide range of mediums used for displaying information. Unfortunately, in the spectrum of possible solutions, none are truly designed for small business owners and they are left with imperfect solutions that are unfriendly to the environment.
Print signage is static and hard to update, generating a lot of wasted paper, and digital displays are expensive, using excessive amounts of energy, often to display simple messages. I’ve been investigating this space to understand and design the optimal solution to for a greener alternative that empowers and enhances the work of small business owners.
After interviewing everyone from small independent restaurants, retailers and nail salons to large paper companies and international apparel chains, I have narrowed in on a product vision laser focused on satisfying the needs of brick and mortar businesses. I have iterated through a couple versions of the hardware prototype and have a mobile app for them to control the display.
Stylo is a low energy, zero waste self drawing display that allows restaurants and store owners to more easily connect with their customers while reducing their environmental footprint.
Using erasable markers and a precision eraser, Stylo draws and re-draws displays at the push of a button, from specials boards to menus to custom infographic dashboards, it can display everything a pen can draw, but faster and more precise!
Since there is no power required to display the messaging, Stylo can operate on very low power consumption which enables it to be battery powered, solar charged and remotely located.
With a working prototype and a strong understanding of the target customer, I am pursuing funding for a pilot program of 10 units to validate the value of Stylo for customers and harvest feedback on the mobile application. The results of this program will be used to solicit further funding to tool larger quantities of product.
The Opportunity
Why is it that so many small businesses use chalkboards to communicate with their customers? They are either really poorly drawn or were done nicely once and never erased since. To me these types of behaviors highlight the opportunity for a display that is better designed for the needs of a small business owner.
So I started to interview a wide range of brick and mortar stores to understand why they use chalkboard signs and why they haven’t evolved into something higher fidelity.
There are a wide range of things that businesses need to communicate to their customers. Menus, specials, announcements and promotions, changes in hours, inventory or operations, or bad puns that will make you stop on the sidewalk for a moment to look in a store, and these things need to be updated on a daily basis or even multiple times a day.
The first customer insight I uncovered came from a woman I chatted which while she was setting up a hand-drawn chalkboard easel outside her small restaurant. She told me that updating these signs was the worst part of her job and she “hates doing it”. It takes her a couple hours to painstakingly draw it, and when she was done, it was still slightly off and less than perfect. She said that she had received offers for free digital displays for the window but turned them down because they would cheapen the value of her restaurant.
The second customer insight was came from a women who ran a chain of nail salons. During the pandemic, they had started displaying a daily sign with trivia and thought provoking question to try to engage customers. Anything that they could do to get people to stop and spend time around their business was super valuable to build up their presence in the community. But to her dismay, "we wasted so much paper everyday”.
And the most commonly cited pain point that I heard came from the owner of a sandwich shop who said, “I get up at 1am to start baking everyday. The only reason I haven’t updated the prices on our chalkboard menu is because it would require me to stay an extra 3 hours and I just don’t have the time.”
Time was undoubtedly the most valuable resource for any small business trying to make ends meet and though signage can have a huge value by bringing in customers, the current low cost mechanisms for reaching customers just take too much time to properly utilize.
When you look at the marketplace of printed signage and digital displays, there is a spectrum of display options for small businesses ranging from printed paper signs, mounted chalkboards and A-Frames to tablets, computer displays, and projectors.
The printed mediums are typically less expensive but require static messaging and not easy to update. Store owners either need to settle for assets that they print themselves on 8.5x11” computer paper or order posters from an outside vendor which takes a couple days to print and then need to be picked up. And every update you want to make means you are throwing out more paper.
Though digital displays are more dynamic and update instantly, they are expensive to install, require IT knowledge and ultimately are less desirable aesthetically for most small businesses. And between the large format displays and the computers that run them, they are using an excessive amount of energy to run the display.
When all of this research and interviewing was distilled down, there was a clear opportunity that emerged: Small brick and mortar business owners need a lower cost, more sustainable way to communicate with their customers that is professional, gets customers attention and most importantly, is super quick and easy to update.
The Innovation
With these customer insights in mind, I have designed a product that is focused on providing a low cost dynamic display for small brick and mortar businesses that can be customized and updated with a couple clicks of a button. In short, the device is essentially a self-drawing white board that can be controlled from a mobile app. It will allow store owners to quickly update menus, specials boards, and promotional displays with the hand-drawn aesthetic of a chalkboard and the dynamic nature of LCD monitor, all with zero the waste of paper signage and 1/10th the energy usage of a digital display.
The intention is to have a collection of templates that users can download onto their tablet, adjust the text and customize as they desire then simply press print and get back to work while their displays update.
The core technical innovation is in the architecture of the pen plotter that yields a substantial cost reduction from the $1200+ for a typical commercial pen plotter down to a $300 plotter. The device uses a roll of frosted acetate that runs vertically on two rollers while the dry erase pen moves back and forth drawing on the surface. Combined with an eraser feature, the display can update itself without need to for intervention and doesn’t require any consumable materials, like paper. Additionally, because there is no energy required for displaying the signage, the overall power footprint is substantially lower than a digital display, ideally eventually allowing for the battery and solar powered options which would allow customers to provide dynamic displays in places where they don’t have a power connection.