Reece: Becoming a pretotyping powerhouse

A Century of Innovating

Reece is an Australian success story that has been innovating since its humble beginnings. Founded over 100 years ago, the company began by selling things out of the back of a ute. Now it’s a six-billion-dollar business with an international name and hundreds of stores Australia-wide. 

A core value at Reece is to ‘innovate big and small’. They have a deep-seated culture of experimenting and being open to new ideas, always trying to bring products to the table that put customer needs at the forefront. 

Alan Sharvin, Head of Digital at Reece says: ‘We love building great digital products for our customers, however building great products it isn’t always a given. We wanted to take the finger crossed, ‘adopt the brace position’ approach out the equation and have more insights and confidence that the products we build are going to be successful, before we build them.

Sounds too good to be true right? Enter: pretotyping. 

Creating Impact

Reece reached out Leslie and Exponentially to explore and understand more about a rapid experimentation approach (pretotyping). Initial introductory sessions proved fruitful – with Leslie’s deep knowledge, passion, energy and no BS communication style, Exponentially’s approach resonated and a great partnership formed. 

For their first pretotype, Reece decided to test whether customers would want to go back and edit their online orders after submitting them. They simply put a ‘edit order’ button after a customer placed an order, then once clicked, they were given a free text field to write what they wanted to amend or change – that’s it! This information went straight to the 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 Sharvin, this process allowed the team to gauge whether there was enough interest in this feature (i.e ‘should we build it?’) but also importantly gaining rich insights into finding out what the things customers wanted to amend. This experiment had real data, with real customers, where customers believed it was a real feature and demonstrated with action that there was interest,’ says Sharvin.