A six week project for the Swedish Fashion Council: a digital solution to communicate trends in a profitable way.
Strategy, Service design, User experience design
A six week project for the Swedish Fashion Council: a digital solution to communicate trends in a profitable way.
User researcher, Strategist, Service designer, User experience designer
Hyper Island, Stockholm
The Swedish Fashion Council
December 2014
The goal: “create a digital solution that enables The Swedish Fashion Council to distribute trends and inspiration to their clients”. The organization had been delivering their fashion forecasts, trend analysis and inspirational materials as tangible books.
We discovered that selling those books was the only way for the SFC to survive. And, It has kept them from completely fulfilling their original mission to support fashion designers and promote Swedish fashion. So we decided to challenge the brief and instead create "a digital solution to communicate trends in a profitable way".
We started with user research. Several interviews were conducted with fashion designers, trend analysists and other fashion professionals. Step by step we discovered and explored each part of the fashion industry, where the friction points were, what each professional needs and so on. Then we conducted some surveys to get quantitative data about the insights we had derived from the interviews. From that point we moved to the next step co-creation.
Before beginning the co-creation we had some tasks to do with the client:
Our results from the co-creation workshop
We conducted a co-creation workshop. We prepared three exercises in advance to facilitate the process.
After working on this project for 3 weeks we realized that the SFC possessed an extraordinary knowledge about the fashion industry and had a huge network. We saw that as a great opportunity for them. Our solution was:
A social platform that communicates trends from the SFC, generates trends based on user ratings, and promotes fashion designers and helps them to develop their professional network.
To ensure that our solution would work we needed some evidence. First of all we selected only those features that were crucial in other words we defined the Minimum Viable product (MVP).
Working on the prototypes
Then we formulated our hypothesis to test. From that point we proceeded by creating prototypes and testing them on real users. I used Flinto to create a prototype of a mobile app.
Flinto prototype of mobile app
We received positive responses from the users which meant that our solution was reasonable and efficient. Also the feedback we received enabled us to improve our concept.
Teams for this project were formed out of students from our class at Hyper Island 7 people with different backgrounds and divergent personalities.