Shelf Climber helps to ditch the guesswork and analyze a product's potential. Here's how -
If someone has a brilliant FMCG product concept bubbling in their brain, a revolutionary snack, a game-changing cleaning solution, a skincare secret so potent it deserves its own aisle. But before they invest in fancy packaging and catchy jingles, there's one crucial question: Will it fly on the shelf?
D2C viability, competitor intel, pricing power, and packaging punch. It helps to refine the initial concept, conquer the market, and launch a product that doesn't just climb shelves, but dominates them.
Challenge
Designing a product that helps users to refine and redefine ideas seamlessly with simple steps and in no time.
My Role
Investing Idea viability/ Market research, Competitive analysis, User research, Interaction designing, Prototyping, User testing, Final Mocks, Dev handoff, Feature building
Competitive Analysis
Companies have built products around verifying such conencepts at the initial stages as wel as in t he interim stages. Most of them are doing well in market, a few are failing as users are avoiding to rely on them for multiple reasons. A proper user research and product analysis is done only around the failure reasons and ways to overcome them. Please feel free to connect to discuss more on this.
Problems Identified
While testing an early version of this D2C concept analysis tool, we came across some surprising insights. As initial vision was driving innovation in the D2C space, but user feedback suggested it could be even more for the below pointers:
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Impact of existing D2C products: Users wanted to understand the demand for existing products in the same and nuanced space for the current and recent period.
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Validating "red ocean" opportunities: To identify the under-served market needs and assess the demand for entirely new product concepts.
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Bridging the gap between test runs and real-world sales: Users highlighted the issue of discrepancies between test sales and actual market performance.
Solutions
Instead of relying on existing analysis tools that had their own constraints, we utilized a decade of FMCG data which gave close to precise, honest, and non-biased results on the acceptance of concepts fed to the platform.
Wireframes
Presented the above findings to the Leadership team and came up a with below wireframes after multiple rounds of discussions and brainstorming.
High Fidelity Wireframes
Once, the ideations were ready, I picked ideas from different iteration and finalised a fundamental design solution covering most of the issues
Future Scope
The current solution is undoubtedly fulfilling the need for robust concept validation but it is not enough for a larger scale of product development. So, the Client will perform and outsource multiple rounds of testing with both targeting the respective audience.
The testing range is diverse, and currently this is being carried out on different tools as most of them are not offering all sorts of tests. There are virtual tests to assess packaging, branding, advertising, photography, and associated images, etc.
However, to test tangible elements like odor, taste, look and feel, weight and volume, aisle placement, all of this is done on real grounds to complete validation because it significantly influences consumer behavior.
For instance, In-store trails, sampling campaigns, offering trial versions to retailers, etc
Hence, scaling the product is essential to make sure most of the features can be offered in-house to them say Image and packaging analysis, etc.
