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Articles
Papugai's Bellevue, Washington headquarters.
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The beginning of SmartCommerce.NET™
A Simple Beginning
When
Papugai developed its very first e-commerce website in 1999, we were a team of
busy creatives (mostly), working long hours, and shopping online every day. We had some consistent opinions and attitudes around
the about online stores, and the members of our team were continually
annoyed with these sites for the same reasons:
- Lack of unique ideas and creative solutions. (So many websites looked and behaved eerily similar.)
- Inconsistent brand treatments and messaging
- Many assumptive application behaviors that completely missed large demographic groups.
- Little or no Macintosh support
- Horrible, clunky shopping cart designs and behaviors
- Impossible to understand shipping options (and no arrival-date shipping)
- No multiple-recipient solutions (or very poor ones)
- The most surprising thing was that even well branded companies seemed
to be settling for horrible website design, little or no brand
representation, poor and confusing usability, and very limited
functionality.
But why? Why were these sites so horrible? Many, after all, were owned by very large and/or reputable companies that could easily afford to do it right.
After
several months of deep research within the e-commerce market, including
countless discussions with consumers, businesses, development firms and
software engineers, we finally figured it out: These website projects
deliberately and ignorantly excluded top-level creatives from the
planning and design processes.
It was that simple, and it all
made sense. Thinking back to 1996-2003, many of you probably recall
hearing some executive say, "For the website? Call the IT guy." Then
the IT guy would call his buddy (perhaps some form of software engineer or similar), and the next
thing you know, some "dev" firm got the website contract. And "devs"
all thought that creatives were the heavily-tattooed lot with green
hair and 40 facial piercings, who sat in the back room and drew logos
all day, so the term "creative direction" stayed in the print and ad
world for a few more years than it should have.
What a colossal separation there
was between creatives and techs during that period in time. How that
came to be is a complete mystery, but Papugai was one of the very first
firms in the country to fully embrace the challenge of creating powerful
synergy between these two dissimilar groups.
By knowing exactly what not to be, success was the only other option.
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A screen capture showing one of Papugai's shopping cart pages.
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For more information, please call 425-283-0400 or email us at sales@papugai.com.
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NEWS UPDATES ... 9/7/2010
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Branding and creative roots still shine bright at Papugai.
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Just under a decade ago, 100 percent of Papugai's business was in branding and creative services. Today, we are more known for our technological inventions and innovations around e-commerce and other web-driven solutions. Still, Papugai's effective brand development solutions and award-winning designs keeps a spotlight focused on it's creative side as well. » read more
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Papugai Celebrates
20 Years!
A note of thanks from managing partner.
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I looked at the calendar this week and it suddenly hit me... We've been doing this for 20 years. 20 YEARS? Man... That means every time I tell a story about the 1980's (the decade we started all this), I have to stop and realize that roughly half of our professional staff were still in grade school or perhaps not even that.
But it's fun to think about some of those more-than-decade-old client relationships that are still going strong today. » read more
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