Good Design, Bad Communication

A Comparison of Airbnb and Spanx

At first glance, Airbnb and Spanx have very little in common - one is a shapewear company, the other lets travellers book other people’s houses. Even their origin stories have very little in common at first glance - Spanx’s biggest struggle was getting manufacturing deals, while Airbnb’s was overcoming preexisting bias.

If we look deeper, these companies are much more similar than they first appear. Their biggest struggle boils down to their competence in design while ignoring the human interaction they need to succeed and get their design on the market. In the case of Airbnb, it was focusing too much on a “perfectly designed” website and ignoring what would actually make people want to use their service. In Spanx’s case, it was being too narrow in the product research and where customers could actually be found to make the business profitable. These companies had to take drastic measures to recover from losses and fix what was missing. 

Airbnb had to finance themselves with maxing out credit cards and repackaged limited-edition cereal. They had to be told to find out why people used their service, then flew out to their early adopters, and only then realized their website and interface were incomprehensible. Spanx had to fight with manufacturers to get a deal and almost failed a sales meeting, before realizing that their product was in the wrong store and section entirely and putting their product in a store without a contract.

In the case of these companies, project management could have prevented their problems entirely. Project management is the ability to plan in advance for future problems, like making deadlines and workflows at the beginning of the project to meet the set deadline. This is much safer with a better success rate than starting the project and hoping for the best. Making a workflow that included product testing for Airbnb and organizing more market research for Spanx would have saved the founders a lot of time and effort.