The Problem

A fashion brand has witnessed a decline in the market position with more and more millennials

uninterested in the brand and its product offers. The goal is to have a more engaged millennial

consumer, stronger relationships resulting to growth in sales and market position. Another goal

of the company is to create experiences that embody their strategy “Comfortable with ME”. This

strategy was born out of a realization that the modern woman is comfortable with her choices

and despite the challenging gender roles, she is comfortable with her style. In this case I

focused on the problem being: Disconnect between the millennials and the brand’s positioning

and legacy

The Project

Find a way to establish a connection between the brand and millennials, showcase the brand’s

expertise, strengthen the relationship with this market segment and ultimately drive sales growth

The Selection

In this project, I used a Number of design tools but what I would like to emphasis is the Learning

Launch tool. According to Stefan Fuchs in Module 4 of Design Thinking, learning launches involve

figuring out what consumer need is so burning that someone is going to buy your answer to that

need. This is an experiment in the market place which should be cheap and fast yet it’s so

important because an experimental learning launch is a search for the truth. But before we get to

the Learning Launch tool, I would like to give you a brief understanding of how I got to this step.

In brief, I looked at a broader topic; buying patterns and behavior of the millennials, what they

buy, where they buy, how they buy and why they buy. First using secondary data, I gathered data

from research firms and experts. I interviewed over 50 experts on why millennials behave the

way they do. How they buy, where they buy and why they buy. Out of this, there was a lot of

insights, with some of them including Millennials need for comfort and spontaneity. These

insights then needed to be translated to design criteria.

Application of Learning Launch Tool

This involved coming up with the key customer, execution and defensibility assumptions.  So the

first step was coming up with the hypothesis. My idea involved the launch of an interactive site

where consumers were able to upload their images and try garments digitally before they buy,

build a digital closet with capabilities of sharing via social media. Accompanied by a digital

campaign featuring top lifestyle influencers, dubbed “Comfortable with Me.” I hoped this would

meet the millennials needs of comfort and spontaneity while establishing brand connection better

than competition. So I sought for opportunities to build prototypes and to test the assumptions. In

order to test this in a Learning Launch, I selected an AIESEC conference which attracted over

5000 millennials for unveiling, since as a brand we had participated in previous years.  Together

with my team, we loaded the content on iPad’s/touchscreens and allowed the participants to

interact. The results from AIESEC were amazing with most of the participants getting hooked in

the digital closets with even pre-orders of yet to be launched collections. Data from the

engagement showed that there was a connection to the millennials.

Insight & Approach

What I have learned from this exercise is that, running to do do business plans immediately after

getting an idea is quite backward and completely unnecessary. In the 21st century where

customer is not just key but also the customer knows what he/she wants we must talk to our

customers make sure we are meeting the specific need better than competition and this can be

well achieved through Learning Launch tools.

Next time I will combine different tools of design thinking for better results. For example, in this

case I could have also used Story Telling both in the campaign and training the “Digital Live

Chat” teams in order to improve the overall customer experience.

