Lean and Luxury: can they work together ?
For the past two years, I’ve been a professor of Entrepreneurship at Paris College of Arts. 99% of my students were aspiring designers and fashion creators.
While teaching them how to apply Lean to the creation of new luxury brands or concept stores I collected a series of observations they made about why Lean principles are apparently unfit to Luxury.
By Lean principles i mean things like:
- Identify a problem to solve before building a solution
- Learn from users and co-design with them
- Build prototypes, test quick and iterate
During my classes I became aware that the Luxury sector today is full of super talented Designers, Artists and Marketers. But when it comes to Design thinkers and Lean marketers, it’s another story.
I strongly believe that Lean and Luxury are more than able to cohabitate, and that new generations of designers will have to change the sector’s mindset and techniques if they want to make it even more customer centric and innovation friendly.
Here a few points that were discussed with my students, and developed through my job at NUMA.
1. Fashion is not a need
One of the key principles of Lean and Design Thinking is that it all starts with a user need or pain point to solve. No solution can be successful without a need as an entry point.
Now, Fashion is not a need. Luxury, by definition, even less so — Right? So, how can Lean work without problems to solve?
Do you remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?
If you look at the stages, three out of five are needs that can be satisfied by fashion and luxury : Belongingness, Esteem and Self actualization. It’s not because you won’t fulfill people’s most basic needs that you should abandon the concept of identifying and solving paint points altogether.
Why would Louboutin paint their soles red (and files a lawsuits against whoever tries to copy it) if not to satisfy its clients’ self-esteem needs and need to discretely show a status ? Adopting a qualitative approach to understanding what “needs” to solve can help fashion and luxury develop impactful products that not only answer to the ephemeral trends of the latest season.
2. Don’t share your ideas
Nuclear is maybe the only industry that values secrecy more than the Luxury sector.
Concepts are gold. And much like gold, they’re not to be shared. That’s the typical argument against the benefits of co-design activities and user research when talking to the people in the fashion industry.Trends studies are largely accepted and budgeted, “user” research isn’t.
Design Thinking doesn’t say that you should publish your ideas on the web for anyone to see and get inspired they just say that observing user behaviours and analysing data is more powerful than running broad surveys. Co-designing with a limited number of users can be a second step and serve the objective of making your most important clients really feel special.
3. “Perfect” is better than “done”
“Done is better than perfect” is pretty much a sentence your hear everyday when you work in a Lean environment. Luxury is quite the opposite : no matter how much effort you put into your product, it must respect the highest quality standards. The golden rule : perfection comes first.
So how do you get past that essential contradiction? Seems pretty hard to test new ideas or “go fast and don’t be afraid of breaking things” as Facebook used to say.
I’m not saying luxury brand should build quick and dirty prototypes. But luxury is not about products it’s about experience. That’s the common element between luxury hotels, luxury cars, luxury goods. if companies like Google and Apple succeeds in getting thousands of “early adopters” users to sign-up and buy largely suboptimal products, why couldn’t historical brands do the same? A prototype, presented the right way can be marketed as a selective, restricted access experience.
Working with limited series, ephemeral collections, limited access offline or online experiences can be a way for luxury to experiment with prototypes without losing its exclusivity side.
4. “Timeless” as a value proposition
How can you innovate to be at the forefront of experimental technologies while ensuring at the same time that your product will still be fashionable and work flawlessly in 20 year?
Simple. You can’t.
Technology gets old. Fast.
An obvious example:
Luxury doesn’t.
That’s not a problem per se. The problem is when you try to apply the same rules to all products, digital or physical. “Build it once and it will live forever” doesn’t work with digital technologies. They get old a lot faster than leather and gold.
Instead of focusing on preserving original design and materials against time they should ensure the same level of experience across time, channels and trends. To preserve brands immutability while keeping up with Innovation, luxury brands should focus on experience instead of products.
Having a perfect online customer experience today is as important as having quality materials.
Having an attentionate, personalised and ubiquitous customer service is as important as having a signature scent in every physical boutique.
Having to download a flash plugin in order to access a website is as bad as having to repair your bag every week.
Innovation comes from being able to upgrade traditions through time. Not from trying to stop time or forgetting the past.
5. Lean and Luxury: can it fly ?
I really think that Lean and Luxury can work together. I’m even more convinced that they actually should
Customer centricity, customers ability to pay, love for craftsmanship, exclusivity and bespoke experiences make luxury a fertile ground for innovation.
If they want to thrive in a digital world the brands of the future will need to adapt Design and Lean techniques to the way they develop products. Design Thinking and Lean experts on the other way will need to understand how apply luxury constraints to their techniques instead of trying to force brands to adapt.
What is your experience of introducing Design Thinking and Lean in the luxury sector ?
I would love to hear your stories.
