Posto

I helped build the business of Posto, a data-driven B2B direct mail marketing platform built on the concept of "A data revolution for direct mail." As lead designer, I was responsible for creative and art direction, product design, and technical direction.

Posto's mission was to put an end to scattershot direct mail campaigns by providing a data-driven direct mail marketing tool. It looked ahead to a future in which data would make it possible to send direct mail only to people who are actually interested. Direct mail is a long-established, popular marketing tactic, but what Posto set out to do was a scheme direct mail had never had before. To validate needs and tune monetization as fast as possible, I first focused on internal branding, such as the mission and vision, to get the team moving in step.

The name Posto is a coinage combining "post" and "to," as in delivering something to someone. I chose it with an eye to Posto becoming the de facto standard for direct mail, judging candidates on whether the name captured what the product is and how good it sounded. Nearly everyone on the Posto team worked remotely, so there was almost no face-to-face communication, and the team included members around the world, not only in Japan but also in China and France. Even with those geographic constraints, having the tagline "A data revolution for direct mail." made it feel as though we were all running toward the same goal.

Because the team agreed that validating needs came first, we judged the product's UI/UX less on ease of use (with refinement to come later, of course) than on whether users could actually get done what they wanted to do. Adopting Scrum and working on the customer support front line myself, I kept development moving carefully yet quickly while tuning the balance between user needs and the business. Beyond the UI/UX of the main product, I also designed the operations with printing and delivery partners and handled the technical direction for generating print-ready data.

Posto's biggest distinguishing feature was that it could track each response individually, such as QR code scans and phone calls or faxes. The response data it accumulated showed that the best-performing direct mail shared three traits: the creative fits the target, it has a "hook," and it doesn't say too much. There were even surprising cases that only Posto could have uncovered, such as people responding six months later. Alongside the online tool at the heart of the product, Posto offered direct mail creative production and consulting based on the know-how it had built up, so everything to do with direct mail could be handled with Posto alone. The product was still evolving, but within a year of launch it had grown into one adopted by forward-thinking companies such as Nissan Motor, Recruit, Mitsui Bussan CC, and Money Forward.

Client

Vantage Management, inc.

Project

SaaS Application

Naming / Concept Making

Kazunori Miura

Logo Design

Kazunori Miura

Creative Direction

Kazunori Miura

Art Direction

Kazunori Miura

Technical Direction

Kazunori Miura

UIUX Design

Kazunori Miura

Illustration

Kazunori Miura

Print Design

Kazunori Miura

Front-end Development

Jacy li, Vantage Management

Back-end Development

Vantage Management, Jacy li

Launch

2018.6–