Reece: Becoming a Pretotyping powerhouse
Best known as a plumbing and bathroom brand, Reece is a $6+ billion business with an international name and hundreds of stores in Australia and overseas. Here’s how Reece’s digital product team uses Rapidly to innovate with more certainty.
A century of innovating
Reece is an Australian success story that has been innovating since its humble beginnings. Founded more than 100 years ago, the company began by selling things out of the back of a ute.
Now a $6+ billion business with an international name and hundreds of stores in Australia and overseas, one of Reece’s core values is to ‘innovate big and small’. With a deep-seated culture of experimenting and being open to new ideas, Reece is always trying to bring products to the table that put customer needs at the forefront.
Reece Head of Digital, Alan Sharvin, says while they love building great digital products for customers, knowing what will be “great” isn’t always guaranteed.
“We wanted to take the fingers crossed, ‘adopt the brace position’ approach out of the equation and have more insights and confidence that the products we build are going to be successful, before we build them,” Alan said.
Sounds too good to be true, right? Enter: Pretotyping and Rapidly.
Creating impact
The Reece team reached out to us to learn more about Pretotyping. Through some initial intro sessions, we helped Alan and the team understand Pretotyping and how it could work for Reece, leading them to give Rapidly a try.
First up, Reece decided to test whether customers would want to go back and edit their online orders after submitting them. They simply added an ‘edit order’ button after a customer placed an order. When clicked on, customers were given a free text field to write what they wanted to amend or change – that’s it! The information went straight to the Reece team, who then made the calls to meet the customers’ requests. There was no code, nothing built behind the scenes; just one button with direct text to the team – simple, and implemented in just one day.
According to Alan, this Pretotype experiment allowed the team to gauge whether there was enough interest in the edit order feature to decide whether they should build it. They also gained rich insights into what sort of things customers would want to amend.
“With real data and real customers, this experiment demonstrated there was customer interest in this feature,” Alan said.
Of course, Reece didn’t stop there. With Pretotyping now embedded into their digital innovation and product development process, the Reece team uses Rapidly every day, testing hundreds of ideas each year to find the best ones for their customers.
Hear from our customers
“Rapidly takes the fingers crossed, ‘adopt the brace position’ approach out of the equation and gives us more insights and confidence that the products we build are going to be successful, before we build them.”
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