Circular

How Crafted helped Circular.co launch a first-of-its-kind B2B recycled materials exchange.

Overview

When CEO Ian Arthurs started researching sustainable commodities in 2021, he soon noticed a glaring gap: there was no clear, centralized place to buy and sell recycled materials. While one or two niche players offered small, one-time purchase options, there were no tools available that offered access to large scale buyers and sellers, materials pricing transparency, or value-added services.

Speed to market was of the utmost importance, but not at the expense of quality. Enter Crafted in February of 2022. We partnered closely with Ian and his budding team to define, research, design, build, and launch the Circular.co recycled materials trading platform a mere 4 months later, in June of 2022.

As the Circular.co team continued to grow over that period, Crafted not only led the product development efforts, but also paired closely with the newly hired Product and Engineering team to help ensure process continuity and a smooth transition after launch.

Approach

Define

Over several working sessions both onsite at the Crafted office in Denver and online via our favorite tool Miro, we leveraged Ian’s market expertise and Crafted’s comparable product analysis to clearly define the problem we needed to solve. We also documented our risks and assumptions along the way to continually mitigate any potential for misses in our final product.

Design

With a clear understanding of the market and user problems, Crafted designers hit the ground running, mapping the full user journey, and settling into rapid one-week prototyping cycles. By working chronologically through how a user would experience the application rather than diving straight into the primary app functionality, we unblocked engineering efforts as soon as possible. As the full product came together, we dove into user research and validation efforts with early partners, helping to adjust our designs where necessary.

Build

Throughout the problem definition and early design process, Crafted engineers were hard at work standing up the infrastructure for the new application. Knowing that rapid development and iterative cycles were crucial for this pre-launch product, we picked a tech stack that allowed for flexibility and easily repeatable front-end patterns, without sacrificing the ability to scale effectively as product usage increased. By also leveraging best practices like Test Driven Development, and building out a CI/CD pipeline from the start, we built quickly and confidently!

Launch

With a now functional product, the Circular ops team began demo-ing the platform to early target partners, documenting the second round of user feedback. The Crafted team was then able to layer on final iterations based on that feedback and polish the product for a full GA launch in mid-June. Final pre-launch preparation included the implementation of Pendo to ensure comprehensive analytics, and provide in-app walkthroughs and tool tips to streamline user onboarding. By the end of June, Circular had millions of pounds of recycled plastic available on their site, and the first proposed trades were in negotiations!

“That is for sure the reason a business like ours would use a company like Crafted. Because its a working machine.”

JAMES NICOLSON, VP oF ENGINEERIGN — CIRCULAR.CO

Outcomes

By leveraging Ian’s market expertise and Crafted’s lean, balanced team approach, we were able to take an opportunity from concept to launch in under 5 months, and hand the Circular.co team a product primed for iteration and growth. This easily extensible approach offers a proven method of zero to one product development applicable to a wide array of markets and product types!