Challenge

The consumer insights team at Wolverine Worldwide had been building momentum around understanding the Merrell consumer better. The next phase of work was focused around the Outdoor Life category and specifically those consumers who have made a life choice or sacrifice to live by the edge of nature. They needed to develop and execute a user-centered, in-market research campaign to identify insights to inform the next season's design briefs.  

Approach

The research consisted of two phases. First we traveled to Truckee, Nevada and to Burlington, Vermont. There we spoke to twenty-seven consumers, visited numerous retail environments to capture as much as we could related to the day to day life of these consumers and the culture of these cities.

Next, we brought together a diverse team from product development, marketing, and sales to share what we heard, identify key learnings and insights in order to develop initial product concepts to solve the needs for the consumer we found. As a team we took these insights and distilled those to down core human truths. These were then shared with the product development team and the designers to inform and inspire the product briefs and the product designs for the following season.   

Impact

A number of insight-led products were developed and launch out of this project, a milestone for Merrell. They were well received in the market and outsold similar product releases that season.