Flush — A Design Blog by Ivan W. Lam at ivanwlam.com

A slight, temporary change of direction this past month. I had been working on my web site still, though at a slower rate than before. I took on a small, short freelance project recoding a website that is easier to manage and a lot more standards-compliant. But mainly, my time has been split into two parts: one for my website, and one for a part-time job.

Long story short, and in a way that I’ve been describing to my friends and such, I am now working part-time at Peet’s Coffee and Tea as a barista while I’m finishing my portfolio and web site.

I’m still training at Peet’s, so I don’t really considered myself a barista, yet. Nonetheless, this move was a result of a readjustment of priorities, the most urgent of which is financially based.

The Strategy

But I didn’t take this job just because it’s available. I’ve thought about this for a long time and have developed a flexible strategy that will work to my advantage in my career as a designer. By working here, I will be able to, first and foremost, have a front-row look at a retail environment and corporate branding strategies, which will give me some background in retail customer experience.

I’m sure a lot of established designers today had part-time retail jobs in high school and college or in the early years of their career, and that experience most likely gave them a slight edge at understanding how it all works.

Because sometimes, I feel that a lot of designers produce things based on what they think looks cool and lack sufficient research in what the client and customers need and want, or that they receive the research from the marketing department and base their designs on words on paper and not direct, personal experience.

For example, I had only worked at Peet’s for a couple shifts, but I’ve already noticed the amount of branding that the company implements onto the sales floor, ranging from the packaging to the interior design to the employee dress code. The company also has a few service-based qualities that are consistently reasserted, especially in the training material.

Room for Improvement

At the same time, I constantly think about the certain methods and ways of saying something that can be improved to increase productivity as well as customer satisfaction and enthusiasm. Occasionally, I tried to picture how and why Peet’s design team chooses a particular approach in their branding and promotion strategies and thought about little things from a retail employee point of view that they could change or add to make both the employees and customers happier.

There are also other reasons for working at Peet’s that will help me in my career in design, but I won’t list them here. But all in all, I am enjoying the experience and will take as many lessons as I could from this and apply them to my future design jobs.

Sayings of the Moment

• “Just do it.” (no affiliation with any athletic company)
• “You fail if you don’t try.” –“Get Up,” Superch!ck (from my high school days)
• “Having guts always works out for me.” –Stefan Sagmeister

Flush.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:41 and is filed under What Am I Doing?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.