CHALLENGE

As a student and a fashion designer, I’ve always been faced with a challenge of making new

innovative ideas on how to improve my fashion business and make my clients keep coming back.

I always felt that I needed one great idea to make the business stand out among others. Not that

my sewing skills were bad but I always felt like I wasn’t up to the challenge of expanding my

fashion business, I mostly felt bad whenever I received complaints from customers regarding their

cloth, I couldn’t come up with great fashion ideas to help my customers feel good about

themselves. I lacked business knowledge so many times I fell at a loss. I also lacked marketing

skills, I just couldn’t bring myself to advertise to potential clients either physically or on social

media because I felt that I couldn’t offer services that would make them feel better about

themselves and that is what I want my business to be all about, so I just stopped receiving orders

for clothes.

SELECTION

MIND MAPPING TOOL

Mind mapping tool is used to generate insights from the data(s) collected during the exploration

of the current reality, the stage of asking what the current problem faced by customers is. It is a

tool that allows an individual or group of individuals or companies to be able to capture the minds

of their potential customers to gain insights into what the customers actually need. For example,

in the MeYouHealth story where Chris Carter together with Essentials Design tackled the

challenge of how to use social networking to get people to do something about their health.

I choose mind mapping tool because it would enable me to gain insights into the needs of my

potential customers, to capture their minds, to know exactly what they need. Then to transform

those insights into design criteria that would meet the many unarticulated needs of my potential

customers, before moving into the idea generation phase and experimentation.

APPLICATION

I carried out an online survey using Twitter and WhatsApp users as my online target audience. I

used a poll asking them what they wanted from their fashion designers or tailors, giving them

options:

1. Perfect finishing

2. Perfect sizing

3. Timely delivery

4. Perfect packaging

The results                           Twitter                WhatsApp

1. Perfect finishing      52%                        64%

2. Perfect sizing           31%                        33%

3. Timely delivery       16%                        20%

4. Perfect packaging      1%                          5%

I have made an extra effort in making sure that the finishing on those clothes are near perfect and

I have added some new measurements to my measurement book to ensure I get every angle of the

customer’s body to ensure better fitting and also I haven’t relented on trying to make timely

delivery and making sure the clothes get delivered neatly.

INSIGHTS

The little insights I gained from this little experiment have shown that majorly what customers

want concerning their outfits is a nice and perfect finishing with perfect sizing. I also spoke with

some customers physically who mentioned the same thing and complained about how designers

are mostly concerned with packaging their products for advertising sake and that many times the

cloth doesn’t fit. As a fashion designer, I shouldn’t have a problem with conversing with my

customers. And that I didn’t need this “big idea” before I can actually make customers happy and

satisfied. I always loved to see satisfaction and happiness in the eyes of my customers and using

design thinking has given me a deeper insight into how I can make my customers truly happy.

APPROACH

As I continue to venture in this line of business, my major focus from now on would be first

conversing more with my customers get to know how they truly want their job done and also give

a time frame that will not only be comfortable for my customers but that will also be comfortable

for myself so I can get their job done rightly with no rush. I’ll improve on my mind mapping skills

for future works as it is a great tool that really helps in this fashion business. It helps us to learn

more about customers unarticulated needs.

