Case study
Store-within-a-store Experience
Tide Cleaners/Procter & Gamble · Service Redesign
Situation
Tide Cleaners had found a scalable growth model in asset-light formats: locker installations in dense urban residential and corporate environments centralized cleaning operations and dramatically reduced cost. The grocery store format was the next step, offering broader reach, higher foot traffic, and lower overhead than freestanding locations.
Every grocery partner offered a different physical footprint. Square footage, sightlines, and store traffic patterns all varied, and there was no standard space to design against.
Complication
The grocery store format stripped away the safety nets the existing service relied on.
First impressions.
Grocery locations reached customers who had never encountered Tide Cleaners before. The service had to introduce itself and deliver simultaneously, fitting into a shopping trip rather than interrupting it: navigating with a cart, managing bags, staying oriented in someone else's store.
No staff, no backup.
Freestanding locations ran lean but still had people who could assist. Grocery locations had none, and grocery staff were neither trained nor expected to fill that gap. Every breakdown in the experience was a dead end.
Strategic gaps.
The brand had no formal service experience principles: no guidance for how the experience should look, feel, or flow across physical space and digital touchpoints. Staff had masked that gap. The unstaffed format made it unavoidable.
Action
I designed a flexible, fully self-sufficient service experience from strategic foundation to tactical execution.
Experience principles.
Conducted field research and cross-functional workshops to surface insights and define experience principles. Established the foundational guidelines for how the service should look, feel, and flow, giving the brand the design foundation it had never formally articulated.
Closed gaps.
Mapped current and future experiences to identify where multi-channel journeys broke down without staff support, including signup and onboarding, which needed to be completely rethought. Framed each as an opportunity to generate concepts that were accessible, self-explanatory, brand-forward, and self-serviced.
Built the format.
Selected two layout patterns flexible enough to cover a wide range of retail footprints, balancing design breadth against available resources. Developed those patterns into high-fidelity, execution-ready solutions built to hold up across the end-to-end store experience, regardless of a given location's constraints.
Outcome
- Unified every urban Tide Cleaners format, including locker installations, under the brand's first shared experience strategy
- Redesigned the signup and onboarding flow to support multi-channel in-store registration
- Created a full system of touchpoints across two flexible layout patterns
- Delivered an execution-ready package built to guide immediate rollout at scale, not just serve as inspiration