Planning a better layer for people who work outside
A better work garment starts with the working day it has to get through. A workwear maker wanted to design from those days, so we followed people who work outside through their routines and developed garment ideas with them.
- Client
- Workwear maker
- Industry
- Workwear
- Kind of work
- Consumer understanding
- Our role
- Ethnography and co-creation with outdoor workers on the layers they wear
The question
The company wanted a better layer for people who work outside, and a clear view of their needs before deciding what to develop and test.
It asked us to start with the workers themselves: what they wear between a base layer and a coat, how they layer through a day and a season, and what would make a garment worth paying more for.
Our approach
We met people in physically active outdoor jobs on their own terms, starting from their working routines.
In a digital ethnography, workers showed us how they dress for the job, and we met some of them in person too. Seeing garments as part of real days at work kept every idea tied to the job itself.
Co-creation then brought workers together to build on early garment ideas, so the people who would wear the product helped shape it from the start.
We read everything through the jobs a garment does for the person wearing it, emotional as well as practical. That turned a great deal of lived detail into opportunity areas for innovation.
What the team came away with
Product and innovation leadership had a set of opportunity areas for innovation, grounded in workers’ own days and offered as directional guidance.
They were built so the team could choose what to develop and test next with outdoor workers’ needs in clear view.
Related work
View consumer understanding case studies- What we do
- Innovation
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