I scored my own website the way a stranger would, against the lighthouses of my category. It came back 59 out of 100, and the thing at the bottom of it wasn't what I expected.
This week I did something that had been in the back of my mind for a while. I put my own website up against the two brands I think of as the lighthouses of my category, and scored it the way a stranger would.
It came back 59 out of 100.
I want to write down why I ran that exercise, what it actually showed me, and the thing I found at the bottom of it, because it wasn't the thing I expected.
They're not quite competitors. What they are is the same kind of brand: a hero product that parents come to know over years, through reviews and shares and how long it has simply been around, as a reliable product that serves a significant amount of childhood. Known for quality, ethics, aesthetics. Think of MODU, Stapelstein, Stokke, particularly the Tripp Trapp. The Tripp Trapp is more of an heirloom of childhood than any box of kids' paintings could ever be. It's a touchstone.
I feel like that's my profile too, or the profile I am building toward. I always wanted the mats to be the modern family quilt, used for years and years, hosting so many memories. The mats are deliberately seasonless. Everything in the kids' world is about growing out of stuff, very phase specific, and my products are not that. You choose the size that suits your lifestyle and it stays. I love that on the customer end, because it's consistent, and I love it on the brand end, because there's nothing scarcity-minded about it. I'm not pushing you at a particular time of year. I'm not over-choosing. I don't do a lot of seasonal sales.
Brands like IKEA and Uniqlo have spent twenty or thirty years on a consistent, steady offering that people get comfortable with, learn the quality of, and reliably come back to. Most brands trade on novelty and packaging and virality instead. The ones I measure myself against don't. They are these beautiful everyday warriors.
And they do one thing I know is missing from my brand. Lovevery is the clearest example: the kit is understood, what is in it, how it works, so understood that you can sell it on secondhand without explaining anything. And they explain so much to the parent. The piece I haven't built yet is prompting parents, giving them the skills to know what to do next once the thing is in their home. The world is overwhelming when you're a parent. Help with what comes next is of high value to the customer, and I'm not providing it yet.
Here is the honest version of what came back.
My website feels a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Theirs feel like a Russian doll, or an onion: they present what's important at the outset, and if you want to dig deeper, you can.
My website feels a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Theirs feel like a Russian doll, or an onion.
Part of that is a persona problem I hadn't admitted to myself. I guess my reader is someone who has a baby. But I don't have a baby anymore. Somehow I have outgrown the full understanding of the mindset of that phase. So as my own kids got older I kept expanding the storytelling, the use cases, the value reasoning, some of it just following how I use the mats myself now. The story got wider. I'm not sure it still addresses the core use case.
And part of it is confidence. Their pages are convincing while being reduced. I don't have the confidence to do that yet, to cut my site down to the onion and trust that the outer layer sells.
I have a background in product. A background in creative direction, in a way. I have the eye.
But I don't understand the brass tacks of conversion. Scoring my own site made me feel behind, naive, lacking insights, lacking killer instinct around sales. I would almost love to create a sales alter ego, someone who just aggressively pursued sales while I handled the creative direction and the product development and everything else.
I have the eye. But I don't understand the brass tacks of conversion.
Then I remembered the weighted blanket.
A while ago I was looking for a weighted blanket for my son. I couldn't find a single brand that was saying: I know you're concerned about what this product is made of. Here are the answers to all your questions. I'm concerned too. I wouldn't make a substandard product. This is my face. This is who I am. This is what I stand for.
What I wanted as a buyer was a reliable, trusted partner for the purchase, with a face.
And then last week it played out in my own inbox. A customer in the UK wrote to me before buying, with the exact questions I had carried around the weighted blanket: what is in the mat, what about PFAS, is it food grade. I answered him plainly, including the part where the honest answer is a no. I told him I can't claim PFAS-free, because I don't hold test data and neither does the manufacturer. The mats were produced and certified under OEKO-TEX Standard 100/1, which screens for total fluorine, PFOS and PFOA, but that isn't the same thing as a PFAS-free certification, so I won't present it as one.
A few days later he placed an order for four mats.
Nothing about that exchange was killer instinct. It was just one parent asking careful questions, and one founder answering all of them.
So maybe the gap the score found is real, and the fix isn't the alter ego. The selling I couldn't find in myself might just be this: saying on the website what I already say in email, to the people who ask.
That's the work now. The 59 stands, for the moment. But I know which points I am going after first: answers, moved out of my email and onto the page, where the next person standing where I stood with the weighted blanket can find them without having to write to me. Some are already there: the independent lab results for the mats are public.
And if there's something you need to see from me or from the site before you can trust it, write to me: hello@studiohuske.com. As a small brand, what I invest in is very much driven by what customers ask for.
Kate
