Learning Toolkit: For Small Business Entrepreneur
Facilitate creative thinking for Black Owned Business
Project Duration
10 Weeks
Project Brief
Sweet Auburn Avenue, an epicentre of Black culture is seeing the consequences of decades of disenfranchisement that eclipses its vibrant history, culture, spirit, and entrepreneurial essence. Sweet Auburn Works, a local non-profit helping to revitalize the neighbourhood, brought in SCAD as consultants.
The Aim
The Team
Ojas Gupta | Vaidehi Thakkar | Tamisha Shankar | Ricardo
My Role
Strategist | Contextual Researcher | Facilitator
Project Result
A toolkit that offers design thinking and management methodologies to small business entrepreneurs. The learning toolkit is composed of 35 activities and 3 case examples. This served as a constant guide for small business entrepreneurs to address and create solutions for different aspects of their business and generate value for their customers.
10 Weeks
Project Brief
Sweet Auburn Avenue, an epicentre of Black culture is seeing the consequences of decades of disenfranchisement that eclipses its vibrant history, culture, spirit, and entrepreneurial essence. Sweet Auburn Works, a local non-profit helping to revitalize the neighbourhood, brought in SCAD as consultants.
The Aim
The project aimed to work with existing businesses and potential entrepreneurs to build a learning toolkit to help elevate their business and help them understand how to go from an idea to an innovative brand.
The Team
Ojas Gupta | Vaidehi Thakkar | Tamisha Shankar | Ricardo
My Role
Strategist | Contextual Researcher | Facilitator
Project Result
A toolkit that offers design thinking and management methodologies to small business entrepreneurs. The learning toolkit is composed of 35 activities and 3 case examples. This served as a constant guide for small business entrepreneurs to address and create solutions for different aspects of their business and generate value for their customers.
It allows entrepreneurs to diagnose their business, define problem areas, generate actionable solutions and plan its implementation.
Design Approach
Meet The Client
Our small business entrepreneur was Chisama Ku Penn, founder of Custom Tradition. This non-profit organization is an online fair trade marketplace that partners with artisans in developing countries to help promote their goods to a global market. Like most small business entrepreneurs, Chisama Ku Penn was working as a team of one and struggled with clarifying a brand vision, creating seamless business processes, marketing, and attracting customers.
The client currently faces pain points across the business cycle and lacks a consistent brand image that clearly differentiates her from the competitors and highlights the brand’s
value proposition.
Brand Diagnostic Workshop
The brand diagnostic workshop designed by Momentum was introduced to us. It included several sequential activities like Dreams and Nightmares, Brand DNA, Competitor Landscape, E.R.I.C and Blue Ocean Strategy that evaluated various aspects of the client's brand, like the messaging, competitors and brand positioning. The workshop helped the client identify and prioritize specific questions, issues, opportunities for the short, mid and long term goal leading to an opportunity statement.
My role was to facilitate this workshop and synthesize the data into actionable outcomes.
Activities Conducted
![]()
How might we build a cohesive brand personality that translates effectively on various platforms and acts as a guide for marketing and customer experience strategies?
Co- Creation Workshop
From the target objectives, we focused on establishing a consistent brand identity and defining an opportunity statement . Keeping this in mind we delved into identifying vairous activities based on their purpose, outcomes, setup and time.
Activities Conducted
Understanding each activity and its potential outcome we simplified and designed a co-creation workshop consisting of 11 activities. These activities helped define the brand purpose, mission, brand values, brand personality, perception, brand offerings and marketing strategies.
While co-creating we also demonstrated how to integrate these components in various aspects of the business, such as the website, social media posts and offerings, leading to a brand that incites excitement and connection.
![]()
Understanding each activity and its potential outcome we simplified and designed a co-creation workshop consisting of 11 activities. These activities helped define the brand purpose, mission, brand values, brand personality, perception, brand offerings and marketing strategies.
While co-creating we also demonstrated how to integrate these components in various aspects of the business, such as the website, social media posts and offerings, leading to a brand that incites excitement and connection.
Client Recommendations : - Explore the unique product aspect with the brand identity.
- Revisit the ‘Top of Mind’ activity and learn more about the audience. Fleshing out how the brand identity attributes translate to a thoughtful service offering to create an ideal customer experience.
- Use the ‘Circle of Opportunity’ to generate ideas for marketing content and revisit this activity from multiple perspectives.
Co-creation workshops were designed and conducted by three teams having different clients. The activies in these workshops tackled the identified problems and were combined to develop a learning toolkit.
Learning Toolkit
The toolkit offers design thinking and management methodologies to small business entrepreneurs. It allows them to diagnose their business, define problem areas, generate actionable solutions and plan its implementation.
My role
My role was to structure all the activities conducted by each team and make the toolkit comprehensible and adaptable as per the users' needs. By segregating each activity based on the Design Thinking process of Diagnose, Define, Generate and Implement, the user can combine activities or use them individually.
We defined the toolkit's flow and how it can be applied by users, either in a linear format, categorically, as a specific outcome or as a combination of various activities.
“Thank you all so much for helping me through this and being open to sharing this resource with me! It definitely required me to reconsider some things and have a clear idea of what I want for Custom Tradition. I wouldn’t have had the courage to do all of this without you all! Thank you again so much and I will be sure to use all the tools we created together when I start my rebrand.”
- Chisama Ku Penn (Client feedback)
Made by Ojas Gupta, 2024