The CEO of a prestige makeup and skin care label wanted  to know what it would mean to make better decisions around innovation and was particularly interested in blockchain technology. He wanted us to help his team to explore and test the viability of the technology to address some of his customer’s pain points before he invested huge amounts of time, effort, and money.

How We Did It

We started by working with their  team to parse through the ideas they had tried in the last year. The aim was to determine what had succeeded or failed and why. From there, we employed pretotyping to come up with and quickly test a number of ideas specifically oriented around emerging technologies. 

The CEO thought consumers wanted to know where their makeup comes from and thought blockchain technology could be a good way to show them. 

But we also knew using blockchain to certify the supply chain would be incredibly expensive — which is why pretotyping is such a useful tool. A simulated test of such a tool could tell the brand whether there would be a competitive advantage in using blockchain.

The crux of the test was to break the origins of various products into layers, to see just how much a consumer wanted to know. Did they want to know what products were in a given product and perhaps where they were sourced? Or did they want to know even more, such as what region the product came from or even the farm?

If users clicked all the way through to this layer of specificity, it would tell us  that investing in blockchain tech would be worth it. If not, giving customers more basic product information may be sufficient. Testing this in a lo-fi way, rather than investing in blockchain right off the bat, could save thousands of dollars.

By the end of the project, the participants had a deeply worked example of the application of blockchain technology. Pretotyping the solution allowed them to make an informed decision about whether or not it would be a worthwhile investment.

But that’s not all. If the folks at our makeup and skin care client engage a vendor or a vendor puts a solution in front of them now, they have the tools to determine whether it’s the right one for them.