When Aussie online retail startup, Farm Fresh Delivered, crowdsourced their company branding on DesignCrowd we wanted to find out more about the how the company got started so we asked company co-founder Che Bliss to tell us more about his business, the process of crowdsourcing his logo, signage and promo flyers and why he's a big believer in A/B testing design and branding assets.

Farm Fresh Delivered is a family owned and operated business based on the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia. Husband and Wife team, Ché & Lisa Bliss, started the business with a promise to home deliver the very best fresh produce that Australia has to offer. The online store includes a range of fresh fruit and vegetables, butchery items, seafood, bakery items and super foods.

Tell me a bit about FarmFresh Delivered - how you started up, what you do, where you are now

The idea for our business was inadvertently seeded by my father, who in semi retirement, decided to start selling fresh fruit and vegetables from his home garden. He (and I) were amazed at the rate in which people were purchasing from his roadside kiosk. His ‘cottage’ business really took off.

I have always had an inescapable desire to build a business from the ground up. So I decided to move away from the digital consultancy work I was doing, draw inspiration from my fathers recent success, and ‘put a fruit shop online’! Since then the basic idea has continued to evolve and we haven't looked back.

Farm Fresh Delivered is truly a lean startup. We started with nothing. No industry contacts and only meagre resources. We fund everything ourselves and make up for the rest with grim determination, sweat & tears! Our business strategy was designed to achieve positive cash-flow from the beginning. This requires that we only devote time to activities that directly contribute to a) customer service b) company growth and c) supplier satisfaction. Its a symbiotic relationship and all three elements need to be in balance in order for our business to operate successfully.

What are you doing better than your competitors?

We operate a just in time logistics service that taps into the highly demanding restaurant trade to supply the very best fresh produce to consumers.

“When you buy from us your produce may have been hanging on the tree or pulled form the ground only a day or so before!”

Farm Fresh Delivered works a little differently to your local green grocer or supermarket. Fresh items are sourced on the day of delivery. Nothing is left to sit in a warehouse or on the shop shelf. This means your produce is as fresh as possible when its delivered to the customers door.

Fresh produce delivery is challenging because supply and quality are in constant flux. Farm Fresh Delivered is very fortunate to have found and secured supply partners who share many lifetimes worth of experience. They are the best in the business and believe in what we are trying to achieve. This has enabled us to tap into a supply network that consistently meets our exacting standards for quality and freshness.

New customers will often switch to Farm Fresh Delivered to find constancy that they can trust. We retain new customers when they realise how much fresher our produce is compared to what they find in the supermarket.

What did you get designed, are you using these designs to this day?

We used DesignCrowd for multiple design solutions. In fact, as Farm Fresh Delivered is a lean startup DesignCrowd has proven to be an invaluable resource for logo, website, signage and stationary design. We have continued to use the winning designers to tweak, adapt and improve on designs.

What was the best thing about using DesignCrowd?

Most recently I have been working in a digital marketing agency, so I’m used to working in a studio environment where we sit down and develop design ideas with one or two designers. This presents a couple of challenges of in the form of time and monetary cost. Its also a very prescriptive task - perfect for executing to brief or a client request, but not so perfect when looking to ‘discover’ the best design solution.

For us ‘Discovery’ is the very best thing about using DesignCrowd. We didn’t quite know what we wanted so instead we presented the results of the design competition to our target audience who then selected the winning design. The process has allowed us to leverage resource beyond what would normally be available to a small business. We received 54 submissions from 46 designers. Each designer interpreted our brief in a different way. Not all designs were accepted and some missed the brief, but we definitely got great value and ideas beyond our expectation. We could easily have used any of the top 20 logo designs.

Need a logo? Check out this helpful article, 4 Things to Consider When Creating a Company Logo
or Kickstart Your Business and Start Your Own Logo Project Today!

Is this the first time you have tried crowdsourcing?

The idea of DesignCrowd inspired us to use crowd sourcing for most of the early development tasks for this business. Our challenge was to use our resources as efficiently as possible and early concept development can be a time consuming and costly process. How do we choose the best name? What’s our value proposition? How should it be represented visually?

We leveraged social media, Google SEM and an email campaign to find potential Farm Fresh Delivered customers and solicit both passive and direct opinion. Crowd sourced feedback and voting decided our company name & strap line. Farm Fresh Delivered, from the farm to your table!

The name and strap line was then used in the design brief for the logo. The winning logo was then used to influence website design. The website influenced signage, stationery and advertising design. The process was highly visible and formed part of our pre-marketing campaign.

How did you choose the winner?

The quality and quantity of the response from DesignCrowd was surprising and took us on a journey in ways we weren't prepared for and raised a number of difficult questions… How do we choose? Is what I like the best option? Will it work for our customers? Does it best represent our value proposition?

The solution was to return to crowd sourced opinion. We selected our top 5 designs then ‘A|B tested’ them on our potential audience by taking out ads on social media and google SEM. We also placed a voting poll on our newly developed Facebook page. We chose the logos that solicited the highest number of clicks. Simple.

It's a fairly ruthless approach and to be honest it took us out of our comfort zone because we had to give up our personal preference and let the crowd choose our company logo for us. The result was the logo that we have on the website today - which wasn't our personal first choice! The commercial upside is that some of those involved in the voting process became our very first customers.

Logo Designs by Sleeping-Sun *Winning Design* (left) and Liviu (right)

How hands on were you during the process? Did you have a lot of back and forth with your designer to get the design you wanted?

It helps to be responsive and provide feedback to perspective designers when requested. Feedback should to be measured and on brief because its easy to over complicate and confuse the process. As a result we have learned a few tricks to getting the best results.

1. Develop a clear brief, one that provides guidelines about what you like and don’t like. It needs to be easily understood without your influence or input.
2. Provide clear feedback and guidance when requested.
3. Cull time wasters. Sometimes a designer is simply not suited to your task.
4. Concentrate time on those that respond quickly and accurately to feedback.
5. Trust the process. You never know when that winning design will show up!

Editor: Thanks for the sharing those awesome tips on how to to get the best results from a crowdsourcing contest. Good luck growing the Farm Fresh Delivered business.

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Written by Jo Sabin on Thursday, October 2, 2014

Jo Sabin is Head of Designer Community at DesignCrowd. She's led the company's public relations and social media programs since 2012. With more than ten years' experience working with Australian and international tech startups in the creative industries, Jo has been instrumental in meeting DesignCrowd's objectives in Australia and abroad. Get in touch via Twitter.