The Elephant’s Trunk - unusual e-commerce developed as an MVP

The client

The Elephant’s Trunk is an Irish family-owned startup publishing children’s books. Their products however, are not like the usual children’s storybooks you can find in bookstores. The Elephant’s Trunk’s owners, Teresa and Derek Bellamy, decided their books will focus on embracing human diversity and inclusion. That’s why the characters in their books are kids with various disabilities and of different races and ethnicities.

The problem

The Elephant’s Trunk’s owners knew they wanted to sell the books online, but were not sure how to validate the idea with the target audience, or - in other words - how to check if users would really order them. With these questions in mind, they reached out for Boldare’s support.

We knew straight away we’ll need to build and release a minimum viable product (MVP) - the first version of an app that would enable users to personalize children’s books and order them for printing.

The Elephant’s Trunk’s owners wanted to keep time to market relatively short (to be ready with the product before Christmas sales) and still release a high quality application.

The product

What’s unique about the product? Parents and carer can personalize the chosen book, making their own child the main character of the book. This is done by the main functionality of The Elephant’s Trunk’s platform which is an avatar customizer. Users can choose various characteristics of the avatar, matching them to the kid’s real appearance.

Customers can choose attributes of disability (such as a wheelchair, crutches, a guide dog, or a white cane); they can pick the skin color and hair or eyes of the kid’s avatar (to match it with the child’s ethnicity); and at the end, they can order a physical book.

The solution

Before we offered any solution to The Elephant’s Trunk’s CEOs, we invited them to take part in a two-day product discovery workshop, where we discussed the product vision and the business idea behind it.

At Boldare, we often start cooperations with this kind of workshop as it gives us a chance to better understand our partner’s product idea and needs. We talked about their target personas, market segments, and user needs. We filled out a value proposition canvas together to see which needs should be addressed by the product.

All this helped us to understand why we wanted to create the product. During the workshop, we advised The Elephant’s Trunk’s owners about the possible solutions (including non-technical ones), and possible business risk. Thanks to this, they could prepare better for the market response to the release. From their side, we received a detailed picture of their business goals which were:

• to go live with an MVP (keeping it within reasonable time to market),
• to grow profit/revenue but also to establish strong social purpose behind the business,
• to distribute their books worldwide in the future,
• to launch 5-6 books in the future (including special holiday editions),
• to keep the business small and family-owned,
• to keep continuous contact with users and ensure their constant satisfaction with the products.

Methodology, tools and tech stack

At Boldare we work in Agile. This is something The Elephant’s Trunk’s owners hadn’t experienced before our partnership. So, after the workshop, we shared with them our daily practices concerning the iterative lean startup methodology and Scrum framework. They saw value in being able to observe development progress from sprint to sprint. We also found a common understanding of what needs to be done and why.

The time had come to form a development team and start exploring technical options of producing the application. The Elephant’s Trunk had some parts of code already written by their previous development partner but after conducting a code audit we decided to write it from scratch.

As Teresa and Derek have been using their own savings to kickstart the product, we have been looking into cost-effective tools in order to build an MVP at lowest possible cost, but without compromising product quality at the same time. One such tool was an online e-commerce platform called Swell. We offered this solution as it’s easy to implement and user friendly.

We also decided on implementing the following tech stack:

• Next.js,
• React,
• Serverless,
• AWS Lambda,
• and Vercel.

We formed a development team of eight specialists with various skills and knowledge. They were:

• two full stack developers,
• two front-end developers,
• quality assurance specialist,
• product designer,
• process guide,
• and product strategist.

Our team started working on the product in May and delivered the MVP in early August (after eight successful sprints and some minor improvements). You can check out the ready application at The Elephant Trunk’s website.

The next steps

The Elephant’s Trunk’s owners, Derek and Teresa, were really impressed by being able to see development progress every week. They liked the final result, although there are still some small fixes to be done. They are about to go live with the product and carry out their strategy in order to reach the business goals they set for The Elephant’s Trunk.

We are supporting them with all our hearts as they have a very beautiful mission that Boldare identifies with. We also do everything to be inclusive and embrace diversity. We support educational projects (like the school opened by the Boldare Foundation). So, our values are similar to those of Derek and Teresa. We are proud and happy we could help them to realize their plans. We cross our fingers for their app’s future and we hope we will get a chance to develop it further - fit it to the market and scale it worldwide.