This project began its life before I ever joined Enactus QM.
To begin with, it was called regen3D, and my involvement was purely as a favour to a friend. A last minute dash to write a script for the mayor's entrepreneurship competition in 2019. This was something in which I had limited interest, but said friend was taking part through Enactus, and I owed him a favour.
Regen3D was just a little too ahead of its time. The idea was to collect plastic waste, known for its abundance in litter-prone Tower Hamlets, and press it through a heated extruder to produce filament for 3D printers. As Roboticists, this concept intrigued us. A cheap, renewable source of filament, however weak or structurally unsound, would make for the perfect prototyping material. We'd be quite literally printing money and cleaning up the streets.
The project was not long to live. We needed more funding than was available to acquire an extruder and access to chemistry labs for materials experiments and prototyping. Suffice to say, a need to pivot soon became clear. We decided to tackle plastic waste a different way.
We decided to address the problem at its root, rather than post-use - essentially, “reduce” rather than “recycle”. The team discussed our habits and hoped to find commonalities in our use (or lack) of single use plastic.
An addressable problem emerged. Even the most eco-conscious consumer at supermarkets, who brings their own reusable bags, has a full recycling bin each week. The plastic around goods themselves accounts for a staggering amount of total domestic waste (cite this later). Among us, some had tackled this by shopping at bulk food stores. Smaller, usually independent groceries that encourage consumers to shop using reusable containers for each type of produce.
Stores like these shared two important commonalities - terrible web presence, and a lack of delivery options. Our aim resolved into focus. Our goal was to support these stores by connecting the huge market for grocery delivery to bulk food stores through a network of zero-emissions delivery partners, expecting that a good proportion would see the value in this environmentally friendly combination.
For this to work, we’d need to tackle product design (for a novel delivery bag), platform development (of a web-app), delivery logistics, partnership with the stores, and reach a critical mass of consumers and delivery partners at launch.
Quite the challenge.
Luckily, as a volunteer run university project, our time was free. The total cost to incorporate was £12 and a quid each. Our set up cost was loose change for a web domain. You’re wont to bootstrap harder than this.
Once we’d hashed out some numbers on the back of a napkin and decided that economically, the idea was at least cheap enough to try, if not viable. This was enough impetus to jump into our first shared task - branding.
The name CommonSans was conceived of the notion of buying common goods, sans the plastic. After trying to boil down the essence of a business to a phrase, and regurgitating it ad infinitum, the answer resolved into focus. It was just common sense.
We considered the potential of a less abstract, more descriptive name. Something that included the aspects of delivery, perhaps even the keyword “bulk”. However, we anticipated that in order for the service to scale, we’d need to continue to add new forms of products. We needed a name we could grow into and define over time, rather than one we might outgrow. It also helps bundles to carve out a truly unique username and hashtag set for improved visibility down the line.
Focus groups responded positively to the memorable impact of the name. They did, however, struggle to match the brand to the industry without given context. This birthed the first of our brand guidelines. The text logo (above) must always be shown in context, with the aspect of grocery delivery depicted visually.
This document would go on to grow substantially. The fonts X and Y were chosen for the logo and the combined slash logo was vectorized for all web use. Our color palette evolved to promote earth tones and heavily feature the colour green, for obvious reasons. To stand out from the low saturation and neon logos of the incumbents, we opted for pastel as a theme (this happened to be the trend in other industries at the time).