“I found your Assortment Styler information last year was very valuable to us as a mid-sized company, like none that I have come across in my experience of working in the industry. I look forward to the new edition.”
We can provide research support for every stage of the design development process, from helping to come up with new design ideas to testing final designs.
New Design Development
Suppose you want a new design, a new look for an existing range of designs or a new look for a planned new introduction (totally new to your offerings). We can help you in many ways:
New Designs
We’ve found that the most successful new designs aren’t completely new and different, but the next step in the progress of designs in a category. As such, successful new designs tend to incorporate elements of existing designs in interesting new ways. We can study a category and produce a design preference test that identifies design segment or niches that are not met by any current products.
Typical Project Timing: 3-6 Weeks
Early Stage Design Testing
Suppose you have a lot of designs to test. Perhaps your design team has come up with a lot of alternatives. Perhaps you have designs from outside designers. Instead of picking and choosing what you think will sell, let consumers (the actual decision making purchasers!) guide the way for you. We’ll interview hundreds of consumers online to see what designs they like, dislike or don’t care about. Our tested and proven methodology can weed out the losers, identify the winners and even identify weaklings that have promise if they are tweaked. These studies have a proven track record of increasing sales THREE FOLD (that’s 300%) on average!
Typical Project Timing: 3-4 Weeks
Final Design Testing
You’ve narrowed the field down to a few designs and you want to test against competition that is currently selling in the key retailers you want to sell your new designs into. We work with you to pick the top competitive products to test against and to pick the retail audience to interview with. The output of the project is a list of the top testing designs for each retailer – the designs that tested best with their customers against the products they already have on their shelves. What better way to arm your sales team for that key meeting than with results from hundreds of the retailer’s customers that show that your designs are better liked than what they are currently selling.
Typical Project Timing: 3-4 Weeks
Money Saving Tip
The real cost in research lies in interviewing the right consumer – the person who has just made a purchase in the category or who is presently looking. Design Research takes pride in carefully screening for the right respondents. As such, a lot of our cost lies in that screening. Once you have that person, though, it makes sense to ask them a lot of questions. Therefore we recommend combining projects and asking respondents about more than one product category in the same interview. Although this costs a little more for a longer interview, it dramatically drops the cost of the research on a cost per item tested basis.