Chris Znerold Product + Brand Systems · AI Design Engineering

Stay Gold

Co-founder, head of product and design, 2020 to 2024 Closed, 2024

Two line-drawn hands holding the words Stay Gold, the loop from the studio's site

Strategy:

Most studios sell hours and hope. Stay Gold sold a sprint with a shape, research to refine and design to test, behind a front door with a free hour on it. A studio run like a product.

Design:

Humanizing innovation was the promise, so the brand looked human: cream, red and navy, a wordmark in wide caps, an asterisk standing in for a sun, and collages of real hands doing real things.

Leadership:

Co-founder, and head of product and design for a team of ten, up to ten engagements at once. PwC made us a preferred vendor across more than ten programs and kept up to four of my designers embedded.

The front door

A free hour, then a sprint.

Gold is a free one hour ideation session. That sentence sat on the homepage for four years and did more selling than any deck. Bring the idea, leave with a plan, and if the plan held, book the sprint.

The Stay Gold collage: a line-drawn figure and a thumbs up rising out of a laptop

The promise

Partner-level experts, on demand.

Most agencies sell presentations and staff the work with juniors. Stay Gold placed experts inside the client's team at a fair rate, to recommend, build and deploy from within. Four values held the room.

Empathy
Design with feelingA deep emotional, cognitive and compassionate understanding of the people the work is for.
Gestalt
Simplify the viewExperiments and exercises that help a brand simplify its perspective and build continuity across decisions.
Excellence
The right wayA relentless pursuit of perfection, the flexibility to do things differently, the integrity to do them right.
Gravity
Hack the bureaucracyRapid pretotyping to attract the insight and inspiration that gets past the org chart to a result.

Product in hand

Martha, on a first-name basis.

The biggest names go by one: Madonna, Beyonce, Prince, Bono. Stay Gold made the case to Martha Stewart that she no longer needed her last name, and Martha.com, the digital version of herself, was born.

Martha.com on a laptop: Plans for Today, the tulip bulbs, and the month's calendar

Product in life

Trucking insurance, finished on a phone.

LuckyTruck sells trucking insurance to owner-operators who live in the cab. We designed the quote, the policy, the dispatcher tools and the dashboard for one thumb.

LuckyTruck on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and a phone: the easiest way to buy and manage trucking insurance

The machine

Commerce, insurtech, cannabis.

Three lanes, on purpose: commerce for Pepsi, Martha Stewart, iFit and Young in the Mountains, insurtech for LuckyTruck and Authentic, cannabis for Slopeside and Zengold's. The sprint never changed, the room did.

Three lanes01/8
The Martha Stewart class experience on a laptop and watch
The iFit dashboard on three phones: multiple machines, supplements, accessories
Young in the Mountains, a Shopify jewelry store with a custom ring builder, on a laptop and a phone
The LuckyTruck policy flow on four phones, from the estimate to Welcome on board
The Pepsi Savvy app on three phones
A Slopeside pre-roll bag with drawn icons
A truck on a mountain road at sunset, illustrated
The Martha identity sheets: wordmarks, type, colour and imagery on a grid

The vendor seat

Inside PwC, ten programs deep.

PwC made Stay Gold a preferred design vendor and kept up to four of my designers embedded at a time across more than ten transformation programs. The board and the call were the office.

A sprint board mid-session: colour-coded notes on personas and behaviors around a homemaker and her routines

The lesson

A room, a board, an afternoon.

A standing team is a calendar you have to keep full. The best sprint's shape survives without one: a room, a board, an afternoon, and the customer in the loop before anyone commits.

From Stay Gold

Position:

Co-founder, Head of Product and Design

Model:

A free hour, sprints, a vendor seat, a venture arm

Lanes:

Commerce, insurtech, cannabis

Status:

2020 to January 2024