– Research reports
– Stakeholder and market research
– Information graphics
– Workshop design and facilitation
– Service blueprinting
– Customer journey mapping
– Brand collateral
– Catalogs and data sheets
Steelcase, a global leader in office, healthcare, and educational furniture, wanted to evaluate the business potential of a custom furniture model. I partnered with the New Business Innovation group as both a thought partner and communications designer—facilitating insight-sharing throughout the research process and by crafting a compelling summary deck to guide strategic decisions.
Steelcase’s goal was to determine the desirability, viability, and feasibility of its custom furniture business model. My role was to help research the opportunity, identify key insights, and communicate findings in a way that could inform the team’s strategic direction.
During the research, we uncovered a critical industry-wide insight: stakeholders held varied and inconsistent definitions of “custom” design. This ambiguity revealed opportunity gaps within the existing service model that limited alignment and clarity across the industry. To communicate this, I developed a visual framework that:
The framework became a central feature of the summary deck, helping Steelcase align internally and identify the next steps.
The research findings uncovered a critical opportunity that inspired a new initiative within Steelcase. One of the operations teams, recognizing the potential of the custom insight, decided to pilot a new customer-focused service model. I collaborated with this team to co-develop a project plan that guided the next steps. This new project included:
The pilot service, called Steelcase Studio, was successfully tested with clients and officially launched, validating the value of aligning service delivery with customer insights.
Since then, I’ve continued to support Steelcase’s growing team as a creative partner, designing collateral materials to help bring new furniture products—developed through this service offering—to market. This ongoing collaboration ensures clarity and cohesion as Steelcase expands its custom service capabilities.
I have engaged with Sara on several projects from strategic-level thought partnership to more tactical communications design. She has helped tremendously at both ends of that spectrum.
As we developed our custom furniture business, we engaged with Sara to help develop the experience design, specifically to engage in the development of a service model blueprint so that we could design front-of-curtain experiences and back-of-curtain capabilities to support a phenomenal overall client experience. That experience has helped to launch a new and highly successful business within our company.
As we developed our “Space-as-a-Service” business model, we leveraged Sara in our communications design, but even more importantly in our “lessons learned” document, which was a combination of 3 years of work…a tool which the company still leverages in their pursuit of business models, so they know what to do and what not to do. That piece had to be high level enough so an executive could understand it but detailed enough so that a practitioner could easily assimilate its lessons into their work.
Ryan Schmidt
General Manager
Steelcase
