The pursuit of comfort over shaping has increasingly become the core demand among new generation of female consumers for lingerie. A few emerging domestic brands have quickly captured this trend by launching “size-free” or “wire–free” concepts to seize market opportunities. This disruptive shift is posing growing challenges for the German lingerie brand Triumph: its products centred on core benefits like lifting and shaping are facing misalignment with evolving consumer needs. However, as a century-old multinational enterprise, with its rigorous and time-consuming R&D cycle and production process, how can Triumph respond to the changing market? How can it achieve break-through and activate new growth possibilities through product innovation?
With the unique and strategic product innovation capabilities, the innovation consulting boutique of Illuminera, THREE INNOVATION, has been entrusted to create a new product series for the spring /summer season of 2024, from the ground up, and the products demonstrated their strong market performance, hitting the sales target just four weeks after the global launch. In addition, over 10 co-created concepts in the project have laid a rich foundation for the development of its new product lines, injecting new momentum into the brand's sustainable growth.
From Strategic Directions to Systematic Implementation
Sticking to Three Key Drivers of Innovation
During the in-depth cooperation with Triumph, THREE INNOVATION had identified three key drivers of innovation, which helped the brand quickly pinpoint its strategic direction, smartly align consumer needs with product design, and systematically improve the product launch efficiency.
During the in-depth cooperation with Triumph, THREE INNOVATION had identified three key drivers of innovation, which helped the brand quickly pinpoint its strategic direction, smartly align consumer needs with product design, and systematically improve the product launch efficiency.
01. Decoding Category Evolution behind Market Trends
Anchoring Product Innovation with Hybrid Data Analytics
In recent years, the lingerie industry has been experiencing rapid transformations, with various new concepts such as rabbit-ear cups, jelly strips, and cloud cups popping up continuously. The challenge Triumph facing was how to find the direction of new products that would still be competitive when they were launched a year later.
Team of THREE INNOVATION started the project by integrating big and small data to understand the category trend and explore the opportunities. On one hand, we had got a solid understanding about the role that lingerie played in women’s life today through in-depth consumer research. On the other hand, via the analysis on TMIC big data related to product trend evolution over the past three years, we had identified the core words in the market and their dynamic changes. Based on this and leveraging the brand's technical expertise in fitting and shaping, THREE INNOVATION had accurately set the strategic direction of product innovation for Triumph's spring/summer products in 2024.
02. Applying Function Based Design Thinking
Filling the Gap between Consumer Needs and Product Design
For categories that carry strong functionality, we have found that the difficulty in driving innovation often lies in the significant gap between consumer needs and product design. The language of user demands cannot be directly translated into that of product design, making it hard to turn insights into action. To effectively overcome this challenge, THREE INNOVATION introduced the concept of function based design thinking and supported Triumph to marry user needs with pathways of product design for the disruptive innovation, through a two-step approach.
Step 1
Back to User: Structural Understanding and Clear Definition of Consumer Needs
When consumers talk about “comfortable to wear”, how do they specifically define “comfortable”? And how do they distinguish different levels of comfort? Starting from the consumer perspective, we mapped the category's demand landscape, clarified the structured hierarchy and priority of user needs, and at the same time clearly defined the standards for each specific need, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent transformation into the design perspective.
Step 2
Back to Function: Deploying the Professional Design Perspective for Innovation Inspiration
Based on the demand map, taking the essence of lingerie products and various lingerie design methods and logics into consideration, we had found new angles to break the inertia of inherent lingerie design, providing demand-driven inspiration for new products. For instance, we found that functional performance in beautifying breast shape could be achieved through multiple approaches such as cutting patterns, strap designs, cup shaping, and underwire engineering, and etc.
Based on the product innovation strategy, the THREE INNOVATION team and Triumph worked together to have generated over 10 lingerie concepts through co-creation workshops, among which five advancing to the R&D pipeline after consumer tests and internal feasibility reviews.
03. Innovation Is More Than Good Ideas
Driving the Successful New Product Launch with “Science + Art”
With function-based design thinking, THREE INNOVATION of Illuminera not only empowers brand innovation in terms of product concepts and design ideas, but also deeply participates in the seamless implementation. For each concept, we provide a clear strategic positioning and core functional benefits, and produce design prototypes/sketches as well as communication narratives. In this way, we can help align the understanding of new products among all key stakeholders from teams of design, marketing, and e-commerce, so as to achieve the efficient product innovation and a continuous source of business vitality.
For More Information please email: karen.liu@illuminera.com
