José Mendieta Jewelry: studying new ways of commercializing jewels

Published by SprintMaster.co on behalf of the sprint master Vinicius Nakamura

Re-thinking services for author jewelry customers, tapping creativity and concept behind jewelry design

José Mendieta Jewelry was founded in 2015 by the awarded creative director José Mendieta, offering women and men exclusive jewelry in contemporary style.

José Mendieta puts more concept into jewelry design, and makes author jewelry more accessible to people

José Mendieta is passionate about design, and after a long career as a creative director in the advertising industry, he decided to dedicate his time to what drives him most: author design through the art of jewelry making.

Having observed the jewelry market, he realized that the offer is overall very similar, and often with little creativity or concept behind these so-called ‘objects of desire’.

He then decided to create something different, and the challenge arose: how do you make the author jewelry service accessible to people through the offer of conceptual and creative jewelry?

Identifying jewelry lovers and their needs

We began our journey by identifying what types of people consume jewelry, and what barriers & opportunities they experience when dealing with jewelry. After a deep discussion, we got to define several users’ profiles, but we stuck to four profiles that were more relevant to the challenge and represented extreme behaviors and perceptions of jewelry consumption.

We then sought contacts in our networks that correspond to the four profiles, and interviewed them to take as much insights as possible about their behavior towards jewelry. These insights were the first step to imagine the solutions we were about to bring to José Mendieta. It was a challenging moment in the sprint, as we needed to adapt our schedules to fit our profiles’ agenda while keeping the sprint on time. We even interviewed someone during a hairdresser session!

After classifying all the insights from the interviews, we were able to draw a broader view about the profiles’ interaction with jewelry, from the moment they discover a jewel to the moment they use it. We could picture what difficulties, pleasures, and intentions people have during this interaction process, as well as gaining a better understanding of their perception of author jewelry.

We invited our extreme users to co-create solutions with us, which would respond to our initial challenge around accessibility of creative author jewelry. Three users sat down with us to understand the challenge and imagine what kind of services/solutions would best serve José Mendieta. This ideation session with users was very intense and productive. Though time is always a limiting factor, we were all very excited about the ideas. The users were happy to present the best ten solutions among the dozens we imagined during the session.

The best ideas served as a motor to our next step: draw the journey of José Mendieta’s users based on the elements we identified in the profiles’ interaction processes, and add the co-created solutions to this journey.

Thanks to the journey overview, we identified what would be the best and most feasible solution to prototype. We focused on a service that could both meet our challenge and be immediately implemented by José Mendieta, since the company hasn’t yet officially started its operations. We discussed this service lengthily, as we wanted to bring the best experience to José Mendieta’s clients, then we roughly prototyped it.

Designing Jewelry and Immortalizing Moments

The results of this sprint brought a better understanding of what kind of channels and services José Mendieta Jewelry can activate in the initial phase of its business while working on people’s perception of author conceptual jewelry. We also validated further solutions with our client that met the initial challenge, which they will be happy to implement in future phases.

The next step is to bring the solution prototype into the operations immediately, and sequence the others in a timely manner.

“We loved the focus and speed on how Service Design Sprints methodology validated solutions and ideas for our business.”

José Mendieta, CEO of José Mendieta Jewelry

Insights

• New service models to commercialize jewels were validated during the sprint.
• The value of a jewel is not always linked to the material or production process it is made of, but to the story or concept that lies behind it.
• Many people think that author jewelry is extremely expensive, and many don’t understand how the design justifies the prices.