Deciding what the next accessories range should be

The question

An accessories brand was up against some very strong products, and it wanted every product in its next range to earn its place with its priority customers.

That meant knowing what the best range would look like for them, what job each product should do in it, and how to move from the range it had to the one it needed, in steps the business could manage.

Our approach

Before trusting the model with anything new, we checked that it could reproduce today’s market.

It was built on buyers’ choices between products described by brand, features and price, with the brand’s priority customers sampled large enough to read on their own. Hands-on product labs and home trials ran alongside, so what people chose on a screen could be weighed against how products felt in use.

What the team came away with

The category team could try whole ranges, built from the tested features and prices, before committing to one.

The choice model and range simulator built ranges of different sizes from a blank page, each read as an estimate of preference when every buyer can see and find every product.

A proposed range gave each product a clear job, and the path to it ran product by product from the current range, balancing room to grow with what the business could deliver.

Profiles of who each product would appeal to came with it, so design and marketing could be briefed from the same evidence the range was built on.