Chapter no.5
THE GRACE TOUCH
“Luminae Intrusor”
It alters the nervous systems and electrical conduction of living beings, creating sensory hypersensitivity. In non-living materials, it generates very thin veins of light that alter internal refraction.
2 µm
So, we are ushering into a new era, a new wave defined by the understanding that the old ways of doing things are done for.
But what about the new way of doing things? Here at Grace Brigade, we call it the “Grace Touch”. It’s made of two pillars, which are further detailed through ten Coups de Grâce. These apply to every project and collectively shape our approach.
Let’s start with the two pillars:
(1) PRAGMATISM
On one hand, our job is to help clients make practical, no-nonsense choices,
saving time and money in the process. This is the first half of our promise and it’s the first half of what forward-thinking clients are asking in the first place.
Pragmatism is important also to understand something key about Grace Brigade: we are not a bunch of 20-somethings who want to “destroy the old world” or “do something radical”. There is no shock-marketing or disruption-for-the-sake-of-disruption at play here. Things must make sense. Things must work. Be efficient. Be clever, not dramatic. Pragmatism is about that.
It’s about using ingenuity to compensate for larger budgets. It’s about the way around constraints. It’s about assessing what’s really needed. It’s about tweaking things instead of creating everything from scratch. It’s about project management that delivers, instead of having tens of meetings and loads of documents. You get the gist and, anyway, multiple coups de grâce will detail this further.
(2) ROMANCE
While we simplify, we must also push our clients to be more daring.
To experiment. To be original, instead of just chasing after best practices and what your two competitors next door are already doing. Romance is not only about visual poetry or pure creativity. Sure, Design, UX, Content and Creative Direction can be part of that but it can also be about strategy or trying out a smart tech solution. It’s a mix of ingenuity, research, lateral thinking and – yes! – dear old taste.
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So, on one hand it’s about removing the fat, making things lighter, cleaner, cheaper (think about the total cost; if something requires zero maintenance, it might be cheaper). On the other, we have to add flavour, making sure that people remember us (our brands, our eCommerces and, by extension, us).
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The Grace Touch and its two pillars can be further used to visualize the type of intervention we are proposing to a client.
Imagine a simple diagram, separating the “pragmatic touches” from the “romantic ideas”. This is a way to visualize our twin approach and lead the conversation through the proposed interventions, showing the balance between the two categories.
PRAGMATIC
_Renegotiate [software vendor] fee, aiming for 40% reduction
_Implement natural-language search (customers do not know the names of the products, nor use PIM language in their searches)
ROMANTIC
_Create Inspirational area and discovery path, so that customers can find not just what they want but also what they didn’t yet know to want
_A new design system inspired by the store architecture
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What follows over the next pages is a list of our ten Coups de Grâce. Each one will shed further light on the Grace Touch, making it both clearer and more three-dimensional.