Helping a Retail Business Enter New Markets

Speck Products found great success as a dominant leader in the electronic accessory market, growing rapidly in the brick & mortar retail space. As business grew they wanted to expand the reach of their brand into new channels & markets.

I joined Speck’s Advanced Concepts team to help establish a design strategy practice and build a repeatable process of innovation. I stood up a small remote team responsible for conducting in-depth research and exploratory exercises focused on new opportunities within existing markets and optimal ways of entering new markets.

The sample below is a high-level overview of the work conducted to identify means of entering the Education market (focus on tablet programs).

Approach Overview

Repeatable Process for Innovation

I was responsible for building and evolving a repeatable process for innovation. As we ran programs using these methods we would refine and evolve the process to optimize results and reliability.
Insights & Learnings

To assure we were solving the right problems for the right people we designed and conducted in-depth market and user research to better understand all parties involved in tablet programs. My team visited schools across the country and spent weeks conducting ethnographic studies and interviews.
Discovery & Direction

Exiting our research phase we synthesized our findings to identify patterns and develop hypotheses to inform the structure of our ideation phases. The research findings also provided an informed set of criteria and metrics for use in evaluating and identifying concepts to move forward.
Sharing Insights & Building Structured Brainstorms

Each brainstorm was structured around pain-points and/or opportunities for a specific “user” involved in setting up, managing or participating in a tablet program. We created tools that allowed us to quickly bring brainstorm participants up to speed and worksheets that allowed us to dive deep into specific areas of exploration. Our scenario & persona-based ideation sessions resulted in massive amounts of ideas.
Concept Generation

The concepts generated in our workshops were organized into taxonomies, archived in our “innovations library” and then weighed against the research-informed down-selection criteria. Our innovation library was a searchable database containing a vast collection of concepts generated from across many different efforts and open to all.
Concept Refinement & Prototyping

Concepts that were identified through the down-selection process were only refined to the level required for the team to clearly and quickly illustrate application and potential. Some concepts would stay in sketch-form, others moved to CAD & modeling, and some would move to prototyping.

Output & Solutions

New Product Line Approach

Our exercise informed recommendations for a product line-up optimized for entering the Education market. Our proposal strategically positioned Speck offerings against the competition and when possible, leveraged existing assets and tooling.
New Product Development

We identified and developed core product concepts focused on specific needs that were not being met in the market and that mapped against our proposed product line-up. Concepts addressed needs of both individual users and those managing distributed tablet programs for school districts.
Ecosystem Solutions

We identified opportunities within the tablet ecosystem and adjacent to core offerings to make protection, identification, asset inventory and charging easier and more reliable for program managers & students. These value-add features were a major differentiator for program decision makers as it solved their specific needs.
3rd Party Insurance Provider Partnerships

We identified and built a business model illustrating the benefits of partnering with 3rd party insurers. This would enable Speck to access tablet programs opting for insurance coverage instead of physical cases. These symbiotic value-add partnerships would be a distribution accelerator for Speck while the insurance provider would see a reduction in insurance claims as every policy holder would have high-quality cases to protect assets.

Big Discovery

The biggest opportunity identified for entering the education market wasn’t with advancements in core product but how manufacturers approached packaging and distribution to aid with program acquisitions and deployment.

Our research identified program barriers and frustrations like;

- Ordering the right type & amount of each accessory for tablet programs

- The cost of high-quality cases

- The amount of waste generated (packaging)

To address these pain-points we proposed the elimination of retail packaging and the introduction of bulk packaging.

This single step would reduce Speck’s landed product cost by almost 40% while eliminating 75% of the waste associated with purchases of the same quantity. This would enable Speck to set product pricing more aggressively in order to secure greater market share.

Introduction of bulk packing would also ease ordering and deployment for schools as Speck could design bulk-packs to match Apple iPad bulk pack quantities. Offering a full 1-to-1 solution in a single master carton using flexible product inserts (bottom left image); packaging can be reconfigured to supply 10 tablet cases, 10 screen protectors, 10 stylus and 10 screen clothes. This allows for easier “up-selling” while solving the ease of acquisition and minimizing waste (and potentially passing along major savings).

In addition to reducing the amount of waste associated with each purchase we designed all components to be made from like-materials for easy recycling. We also designed the packaging to have a second life; the shipping insert tray can be used as a storage tray for IT depts/classrooms, keeping iPads organized during set-up and in-classroom storage (bottom right image).

Working Across Industries