Week 15 - Red Cross ‘Donate clothes by post’ 📮💰
Week two for me and week 15 for the design community at Made Tech.
DIY warrior 🤺
In the earlier stages of lockdown when I was transforming into a type of domesticated DIY warrior, sorting through clothes for charities was in my top 10 list of chores. After filling a bag with items that I knew were being worn a lot more by my wardrobe than me, I waited anxiously for the charity shops to open whilst I fought back the temptation to sneak items out of the bag and back into my wardrobe.
When the day came to visit a charity shop, I felt a huge sense of relief and gratitude that my preloved clothes were finally going to an ethical cause. My life may have been easier if I had discovered the…
Red Cross ‘Donate clothes by post’ 📮💰
At Made Tech we’re exploring how we can use time not on client work to learn in teams and add value to important problems. As a first experiment, Paulo, Alex, Rachel, Maurice and I are spending two weeks with the Red Cross to see how we can improve their new and fast growing donate clothes by post service.
Start of service on Shopify
Being in my second week as one of the new designers at Made Tech, I’m excited to be part of this project and amazed by the amount of donations that have been raised so far!
In spite of Red Cross desperately needing an automated back office operation to reduce the daily strain of manual tasks, their current profit from donations is already estimated at six figures! This wouldn’t have been possible of course without the donors, and the RC team that worked tirelessly each day by managing the customer orders and distribution on spreadsheets, printing and sticking postal labels via an archaic mail merging process - and I feel exhausted just thinking there were around 1,500 bags being ordered per day!! I salute you RC team! Made Tech team is hoping to bring much relief to your manual labour with the magic of API and more!
As an additional service I would love to see an option for door collection - a bit like the Parcel Collect, this would provide an opportunity for anyone that has challenges with mobility or hasn’t got a Collect+ store conveniently located near their home to also get a chance to Donate by Post. Maybe this is something that will happen soon - let’s watch this space.
Learning HTML Prototyping 🤖
This week I had an introduction session on the GOV.UK Prototype Kit (Thanks again Mark!) I was surprised to see how effortless it was to build an actual page from the coded components and patterns in the toolkit, with just merely using the touch of the buttons “⌘+C and ⌘+V” - it truly felt amazing! Additionally, the tutorial that aided my learning with creating a prototype was so intuitive that I really didn’t expect within a couple of seconds to get as far as seeing the start of my Apply for a juggling licence service page. I think my weekend may be sorted - especially now the weather has taken a turn for the worse.
Make the most of any Sunny Spells ⛅
Come rain or shine - have an enjoyable weekend!
See you soon,
Dawn