FLIP/FLOP

We are team Flip/Flop. As students of Digital Media Management at Hyper Island, we got the challenge by Very Exclusive to create their own men fashion site. This document is a critical reflection regarding business trans-formation and our process as a multi-cultural team. Three out of five team members are from Brazil and this made our culture drift in a southern hemisphere direction. It also brought a different view of the problem and made us all think in a different way. Finally, all of us have unique backgrounds, which contributed to colour the concept we came up with and will present later in this review.

HELLO! Aksha Sachdev, 29from IndiaBackground: Digital Advertiser, Brand Planner & Client LeadBachelor: Management & Marketing

Clara Parada, 24from BrazilBackground: ProductionBachelor: Communications & film studies

Yann Merian, 24from BrazilBackground: Event planner for the Rothschild bankBachelor: Communication & PR

Emelie Wänstedt, 27 from SwedenBackground: Graphic designer Bachelor: Graphic Design

Marco Candi, 23 from BrazilBackground: CEO of Rojemac imp & exp Bachelor: Advertising and marketing

Pitching to the client

Team culture

Briefing with the client

5 whys & How might we

Brainstorm

Concepts

Meeting with client

Prototyping & Testing

Team development

Ethics

Secoundary Reserach

Primary research

Team development

Prototyping & Testing

The first thing we did as a team was to create our team culture. We wanted everyone to get the most out of the project and also to eliminate any unnecessary friction. We had in our previous teams seen the importance of a good culture and how it makes or breaks a crew.

To create the team culture, we used the team canvas tool (The Team Canvas, 2015). The first part of the process was a silent brain-storm to see how we valued different subjects such as goals, skills, values and activities. We then talked about why we wanted certain things out of the team and explained the importance of it. We also debated what the purpose of the team should be, and we arrived, in consensus, that it would be “Learn to enable change”. We wanted to challenge ourselves to think differently and shift our perception of what business transformation could be. The canvas also showed that we wanted a fun and open minded environment so everyone could work in harmony and feel like they were being heard. We also didn’t make a schedule, just a draft with some dates on it.

After our first week as a team, we had a few issues with the culture: we were not communi-cating effectively with one another. Some mem-bers expected others to be more proactive, while others expected to get clear directions of what to do next. We reflected about it and added communication to the team canvas. We also realised that not all expectations had been addressed during the first round when we built the culture, and that resulted in some unex-pected friction for the team. Furthermore, we had a schedule structure that did not work and, in order to solve this, we made a stricter one, with clear deadlines and steps to support our creative process.

This was a good reflection on how a team member can be open, while not truly express-ing in depth the importance behind tools and values to them. It’s important to be clear and precise about why something is important to you and how that impacts the way you work.

Despite that, we still had pendencies after a week and needed to have a facilitated meeting as a team to get to the bottom of the problem:

why was our team not working as effectively and happily as we knew it could? The facilitat-ed meeting made us realise that as a team we needed to have reflections everyday. These should be about what we had done on that specific day and address any issues or feel-ings, in order to eliminate any friction that had occurred and to enable everyone to end the day on the same page.

After this team development session, we were anew. It seemed that everyone had understood each other and was willing to cooperate and care for the team.

Team Culture

Our client for this module was Very Exclusive, a sister company to Very and under the Shop Direct umbrella. They deliver midrange luxury brands to customers through their own web-site. Currently, they only have a womenswear site and their main audience is composed by women aged 24-45 that want to own designer brands and care about how they look. The site’s most popular item is luxury brand bags.

The brief asked us how to create a profitable menswear site and to tackle the question “How can Very Exclusive market & retail a premium menswear range without disrupting its current womenswear success?” They presented us their own data which showed that women tend to buy more menswear than men them-selves. This directed Very Exclusive’s focus of the brief: they wanted us to create a product that targeted women while selling menswear.

This created a few questions for the team at the beginning and we wanted to see if the client’s assumptions were true.

The Client & the Brief

Double diamondThe framework of the double diamond helped us stay on track and plan our work. It predicts divergent and then convergent behaviour. The phases went from discovering, ideate, defining the product, prototyping, testing and refining it with people. It also made us choose tools, while making the decisions in a coherent fashion.

Research sprintsInstead of doing a lot of research in one go, we decided on doing shorter sprints of two hours, then talk about what we had found in order to get more insights. This method worked for us because we did not lose focus and got to share findings.

Five WhysA tool for digging deep and finding the root of the problem. It is very helpful to see hidden things you would not realize otherwise.

How might we?A method of finding one core issue, a question the group wants to solve and a problem that the customer faces.

Funnel of focusWe used to Funnel of Focus in complement with the How might we? questions. It was helpful when selecting the one we wanted to invest in. It points whether a question is too wide (high up in the funnel) or if it is too narrow (too low in the funnel). It’s all about visualising the question in another way and in comparison with the other how might we questions.

BrainstormAn essential tool for our team, we used it to get ideas on the table. To get the most out of the session, we did various types of brain-storming.

Prototyping & TestingWe prototyped and tested our ideas to verify their feasibility. The feedback we got made us evaluate the idea, see new patterns, change the prototype and test it again with new people.

Business canvasFirst seen in Osterwalder’s (2010) Business model generation, a handbook for visionaries, game changers and challengers, the business canvas is a tool for spotting where to implement a new strategy and how it will affect the com-pany. It can also be used to see if the business is leaking money or if the customers’ values are aligning with the business values.

Ten types of innovationA tool from Doblin (2016) that is about creat-ing innovation inside a business. We used it to define how our new concept would change the company. We found it to be a useful tool, since we referred to it numerous times during the process.

Our Toolbox

Secondary & Primary ResearchOur first step towards research was to identify the subjects that were missing blocks of the puzzle - the information that was not already provided in the brief by the client. We conducted a brain-storm that helped us define the key areas we wanted to deep dive into. Hence, as part of the Secondary Research, we proposed the following questions that would aid us in understanding the primary and secondary Target Groups, as well as the competitor landscape:• How do men find fashion inspiration? • How do men behave online?• What are competing Online Brands doing?• How to sell men products by targeting women?

We divided the above topics amongst us and went into a two hour sprint to help us individ-ually collate all relevant data points. We found at that according to Rifkind (2014) the idea that men are not interested in clothes is a myth. We also found that many fashion trends are influenced by Twitter and Instagram (Thomas, 2015) and that younger male consumers often purchase clothing items which are similar to what

their friends wear to experience a feeling of belonging to a certain group (Thomas, 2008).

We shared our findings and connected the dots. That helped us arrive at our first set of key focus areas for our Primary Research, which we planned around understanding how men be-have in stores and online whilst shopping. We collectively agreed on conducting the primary research at a time when the subject of shop-ping was most relevant to inspire most valid answers: while they were shopping in stores. We also agreed to include two secondary target audiences to help us get more insights: women shopping in men’s section and sales staff in the men’s section. The questions were aimed at understanding what inspired male shoppers, their online behaviour, their brand preferences and their difficulties.

After this process, we had a lot of rich data and were able to find patterns and consistencies in the responses. That led us closer to defining our key insights that would shape the problem statement. During our desktop research, we had found out that men are pragmatic shop-

pers (Braddock, 2015). This thesis was validat-ed by the responses we received in our Primary Research in the stores: most men confirmed shopping was a task and mainly driven by need for them. This took us to our next main insight about men being quick shoppers. We had inter-viewed a Retail Merchandiser at Mango store and he highlighted that men always walk into the store knowing what they want. Also, they tend to buy more if clothes are stacked in such a way that they derive easy inspirations. We were also able to confirm this data through a report that suggested men spend 30% less time shopping as compared to women (Chang, 2012). Furthermore, an important insight re-garding their inspiration uncovered that men don’t engage in active research for fashion: their inspirations are everywhere, especially social media. Instagram and Twitter, for instance, have become great sources of inspiration for men. To add, we found that men trust social media more than women when comparing products (Richard et al, 2010).

To validate these even further, we engaged in

Secondary & Primary Researcha qualitative interview with a 29-year-old films professional to understand his motivations and hurdles while shopping. The interview helped us derive further confidence in our direction and helped shape the problem we wanted to solve.

To define the problem we used tools to help us think divergently and convergently. We started with the use of five whys and applied the tool on two pressing questions: • Why do men always know what they want to buy? • Why are they loyal to brands?

By answering these questions with the help of our knowledge of the target audience, we were able to find a conclusive direction towards the question we wanted to solve for the brief. We agreed we would spend ten mins silently brainstorming to individually frame possible How Might We questions that would address the brief using our insights. At the end of the brainstorm we had a lot of options available. To make an informed choice, we used the Funnel of Focus to plot the questions based on their

broadness and potential of being solved.This lead us to “How Might We Make Shopping

Possible Without Spending Any Time Shopping?”

With our problem defined, we started to ideate solutions. We did several rounds of different brainstorms this where Silent, Negative, Positive and Clustering.

This was especially helpful for really broad divergent thinking. We discarded no ideas and let our imaginations run freely. By the time we had done with clustering, we had a few options available. We started convergent thinking by logically choosing a cluster that we were keen on working on, which was “Lifestyle”.

We plotted the top three ideas on the Fea-sibility vs Impact Matrix. By then, we decided that one of the ideas was very close to another, so we narrowed down to two. At the time, we called the concepts “Happn my clothes” and “What I wear”. “Happn” would have a high impact and would be fairly hard to make it happen, while “What I wear” would have lower impact and would be easier to develop. We decided to push both ideas a little further and present them to the client.

Next, we created an elevator pitch for the concepts, with a clear value proposition. This

process brought clarity for the group concerning the ideas, which enabled us to go even further with the next steps, which were the ten types of innovation, a tool taught to us by Hyper Island alumni from SapientNitro, and the Business Canvas. The ten types of innovation helped us verify which areas from each idea were disruptive to the market. Here we also decided on the engagement strategy, which was key for this specific client, as pointed out by our Industry Leader. Finally, the business canvas strengthened their structures, in terms of revenue models, key activities, partners and customer relationship.

After the check in with Very Exclusive, we were confident to choose our boldest concept, considering that they were happy with the idea, despite it being a little “futuristic”. The client said that they were willing to be pioneers on their market so we decided to go with “Happn”. We started to ideate further to make the idea more concrete. For that, we created story-boards, that brought us key insights about how the product could work, and a customer

journey. This was vital to our next process, which was prototyping.

At this point, we also changed the name of the App, since “Happn” was already taken. We started to openly chat about options and agreed that “Alfred” would be a good option, since it was a classical butler’s name. Later though, during a check in with our Industry Leader, she pointed out that “Alfred” was already taken by other brands and suggested we refrained from using it. We decided to call it “Very Exclusive’s App”, but defined it as a personal valet, since the character of the butler was still present on the branding product.

How might we

Ideation

Any idea is only as good as it’s implementation and we needed to answer two core questions as a group before we were ready to finalise our concept: whether this idea had monetary viability? and How would we market it?

The usage of ten types of innovation helped us define the level of transformation we were offering in our pitch to the client. We were not only suggesting a new consumer interface for apparel shopping, we were recommending an opportunity to the brand to lead the way for future online retail.

Our learnings and research about the most recent disruptive companies had taught us that the most optimum method of utilizing digital is to change the concept of asset owner- ship to one that is scalable and depends on consumer connections. We wanted to make sure that our pitch to the client highlighted the same. The idea focused on a retail future that was completely independent of stock ownership: the new focus was the needs of the consumer and fulfilment by brands.

We recommended them three new revenue opportunities, namely selling space on the App to brands to showcase their products, commission per sale of item via the App, and data which would make Very Exclusive the custodian of a vast quantity of rich consumer behavioural knowledge that they could offer to brands for a price.

Finally, we had also to address the other half of the problem, that is, the marketing of the App. We planned keeping the target in mind, namely a buyer of luxury category, one who has buying capacity and demands an exclusive treatment. Our App was already taking care of the target group’s shopping needs, now we needed to make it desirable. This led us to the idea of a pre-release for High worth members of VERY. It would ensure the exclusivity of the luxury category and also allow Very Exclusive to test the App on a set of consumers before opening it to everyone. Additionally, we want-ed to capitalize on the power of influencers by targeting and rewarding the ones who had the most powerful voice online. The influencers

were recommended to be chosen based on their degree of early adoption and be rewarded for helping the App grow through Word of Mouth.

How might we

Business Opportunity

After we chose the personal valet as our final idea, we started debating about features. We eventually got to an ethical crossroads. Our App depended on the user’s input of informa-tion and, on the original concept, the customer could point the smartphone at a random person and take a picture of its clothes. We raised the point that this might make people feel uncom-fortable and could act as a violation of privacy. We even discussed that, in the future, this feature could be implemented on Google Glasses (or affiliate technologies) as people’s personal space would be in check as a default. However, as this is not our current scenario, we refrained from endorsing this kind of usage of the product. Instead, we left it as a tool that would enable users to upload pictures into the App: where they got the picture would be their business.

Furthermore, since we are aiming to be a marketplace, we hold the responsibility of protecting our brand partners from issues of design copyrights and creating a secure platform for companies to flourish with us. We recommend that strict scrutiny must be conducted while selecting said brand partners and on-boarding them.

Ethics

Prototyping the idea is a fundamental part of the design thinking process. It is the moment to translate the concept in a tangible way and then proceed with testing it in order to get customers’ feedback. After reflecting on new insights, it is time to come back to the concept and reshape it in the best way to fulfill custom-ers’ needs.

To enable the prototyping of our idea, our group decided to follow the advice of one of the lecturers we had during the business transformation module, Ákos Wetters, as well as Very Exclusive’s CEO motto “to fail fast, fail cheap and fail happy”.

With this in mind, we first prototyped our product in low fidelity. By this we mean a pa-per prototype, showing how we had imagined the screens of our app would work step-by-step.

The first draft of this app had four screens. (See Appendix 1 for screens) On the first screen, the bot would ask how can he help, and then the customer would have a choice of camera, microphone and message to describe the clothes that he wants. The conversation between bot and customer would then take place on the second screen. Next at the third one, a few options based on the search are

offered, so the customer can choose the one he likes the most. Finally the chosen product with its characteristics and the option to buy are presented to the client.

Secondly, we divided our group in two pairs to test our prototype as fast as possible with online shoppers. In these interactions, the App features were explained to the person, followed by an open question: ‘would you use this product?’ This prompted conversations about the product, enabling us to get valuable feedback on it. On this first testing, we made 7 interaction with peers and industry leaders, and gathered many insights regarding our App.

“If I see a nice jacket in a magazine can I find it at the App?”, asked Dag Otto. This question confirmed that men find inspiration every-where, which validated what we had found during our research.

“Shazam for clothes”. That was how Sam, an Industry Leader for the Digital Experience Design crew, defined our product. When we began thinking about the App, we had found inspiration in Spotify’s weekly recommenda-tions. However Shazam is an App that hears a specific song and tells you the name of it. This insight was important to our group to

understand that our product should not offer clothes that our customers need, but rather what they really desire at that specific mo-ment, like the name of a song on Shazam, but with clothes.

“The bot needs to help me out” said Davey van Woert. We discovered a pattern: people were worried about the technology of our App. The group realized the need of further research about existing technologies that could support our product to work effectively. We later found data that corroborated with the framework of our product: “An experi-mental algorithm out of Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab can recognise people in pho-tographs even when it can’t see their faces. Instead it looks for other unique characteris-tics like your hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose” (Rutkin, 2016).

Another tester, Gabriel Negri, asked “How will the App know how much money I want to spend?” This made us decide that previous data from the user would be needed to define price target, brands and sizes.

These insights provided by our testers prompted further discussions for the group re-garding iterations to the product. In addition to what we had discovered, we also decided

Prototyping & Testing

to make our app more comprehensive: many people don’t really know how to describe an item. Based on that, we created a feature that would help the customer more, by asking it questions about the searched item and allow-ing refined results to be offered.

After iterating our product, we tested it for a second time. (See Appendix 2 for screens)

After testing the second prototype, we got valuable insights of our product. Michael, one of our testers, said “I really like the picture up-loading feature, although I would not use the microphone nether the messenger option.” This insight helped us understand that users have different needs in relation to the feature, thus having three options is a good way to fulfill men’s needs.

Davis said, “When buying expensive clothes I feel I need to do more research.” Buying expensive clothes online is different from buy-ing cheaper ones. Davis felt that he tends to browse more. This lead us to our final feature before the presentation to the client: a wish-list, where the customer could store apparel that they liked and make a decision about it later.

After this second round of testing, our App

was ready to be presented to the client. The process with our prototype was fundamental for our group to get valuable insights to iter-ate our product and concept. Finally, working based on the idea of failing fast and cheap was helpful to enable fast and useful thoughts about our product. Our key takeaway from this process was that maybe next time we could take it even further, by testing our prototype with more diverse people than just our peers.

Prototyping & Testing

The client pitch was probably the most impor-tant part of our process as a team. We divided our parts and wrote them all down individually. The synergy occurred on the debate after having the first draft. We joined forces and started editing the script, while also drawing the visual step-by-step.

We then had a conversation with Robbie from AKQA. We told him our general structure and he gave us some advice concerning the length of the presentation. He told us we should be very direct and leave the client with the feel-ing of wonder and curiosity. This was vital to us, as we realized that our pitch, although very good and complete, was not exactly full of impact. We decided to explore it even further and refine the content, as to make it even clearer and inspiring.

We edited our parts simultaneously and read it aloud once more. The results were amazing and we felt very proud of our presentation.

The Pitch

We started this project with very clear and personal objectives. We were all very open from the beginning about expectations we had for the Business Transformation module, as well as individual issues we might face dur-ing our journey as team Flip Flop.

After a week of most of us being absent due to personal problems, our team was finally united when we went to the streets to inter-view customers on stores to understand men’s behaviours. This day was fundamental for us to immerse ourselves in the world of menswear shopping and, in this way, following the design thinking concept of observation.

After that, the ideation part was a success as the whole team was in sync, working in a fast and effective way. At that point, what helped the group to reach two disruptive concepts was the communication between us, which supports the thesis that every idea should be listened and improved.

However, at some point after the ideation, we had communication problems that were pulling the team apart. Through team devel-opment sessions, we could witness the power of reflection. In this case, the group have man-aged to find a solution and grow as individuals and as team Flip Flop.

In our first session as a group, we defined that our purpose would be learning how to change. During the process, we really strived to learn and apply new and innovative tools that could give us another vision of our process as a team. Furthermore, with this in mind, we have used the project to reach, at the end, a disruptive idea that could shape the future of how men shop for apparel. This was possible due to lectures we had at Hyper Island during the Business Transformation module: they gave us good insights and made us want to move forward with our idea.

To conclude, in the feedback we received from our industry leader, we were told that our idea was the most disruptive when com-pared to the other groups. However we could have been even more bold and had presented the idea in a more interactive way on the pitch day. This added to our takeaways as a group. We are all feeling ready to face our next module.

Conclusion

To briefly describe my couple of key take outs - the underestimated, over used and hardly understood term “Honesty”, it sounds like an obvious one to add to the team canvas and easy to misinterpret. Strengthening communication and agreeing to share the discomforting feelings of being a part of this team helped me open up myself and start afresh. Another important learning that I had was on the day of the pitch, during the feedback session: the power to lighten up a pitch room is completely in the hand of the presenter. I had a lot of fun ideas for making this pitch come to life but I got drawn into the logic of time constraints and didn’t fight my ground, a behaviour I don’t plan to endorse in the future.

–Aksha

I guess this group made me go the extra mile towards actually listening and understanding people. I made progress concerning how I react towards frustration, which is a good this. I’ll leave team Flip Flop feeling more confident about myself and my ability to facilitate a group. I want to keep on studying and practicing it - maybe event try to learn more about coaching. To conclude: communication is everything. Never, Clara, NEVER underestimate the power of it.

–Clara

My take away from this team is that culture is important, but also that communication is vital for a group. It’s important to understand yourself but also to adapt to others, but this is something one person can’t do on their own. It’s also interesting how you can work and not work at the same time. I find our journey interesting, as it was often really intense. But my biggest take away are the importance of clear communication and that trust is built during small things, like eating and hanging out together.

–Emelie

The Business Transformation module made me really realize how important it is, even for historic companies, to evolve and adapt to new habits in order to survive and grow. When working in an area such as retail, it is crucial to analyse data to better understand what are the problems they are facing. That is why research was an essential part as it gave us all the necessary insights to move forward. Our idea might have been bold but it was well received and I think we should now try to be even more disruptive and out of the box as we should able to be being at Hyper Island.

–Yann

Because of the fact that I have a traditional company owned by my family and I plan to come back and lead the changes in it, this module was the one I was expecting the most within the Hyper Island masters, to learn how to change. In this matter, the purpose of our team was fitting in a perfect symphony with my personal purpose, and sticking to our pur-pose as a team enabled me to be motivated through the whole project and really learn from practice how to transform a business. Fur-thermore, with the issues with communication in our team, at some point I felt everything was lost and that we were not a team anymore. However, with the team development sessions I could see how powerful reflections are, and how they can help to overcome the most difficult situations in a team. Finally, I believe that in this module I have learnt more than on any other project in my masters, and now I feel truly ready to come back to my company and enable change.

–Marco

Individual Take-aways

Team experience map

Pitching to the client

5 whys & How might we

Brainstorm Con-cepts

Meeting with client

Prototyping & Testing

EthicsSecondary Reserach Primary research

Team develop- ment

Prototyping & Testing

Team development

AkshaClaraEmelieMarcoYann

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References

Appendix 1

Home screen Function of finding what you want Buying screen

Appendix 2

Home screen Chat function Picture function

Voice command Buying screens