How to Design What Women (and Men) Want

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard, get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource, and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to product launch hazards. And we are bringing you a defining definition of something we call gender blend. And this is so important in the scope of how we've been successful and how you will be successful. Bringing your product to market if you don't get what women want to buy, retail is going to be really hard for you.

Very, very hard. And I'll tell you, you know, as a man, you know, and as a designer and a product developer over many years, it took me a long time to come around to realize how critical this is, but it really is true. You know, Tracy and I are speaking from experience here. And if you want to succeed, you've got to design for women because they buyer influence the vast majority of purchases at retail.

Yeah. There's estimates anywhere from 85% to 95%, depending on the product category. And it's just tremendously important for you to be conscious of any gender bias you might have in the process of the designers that you use. Should you be using outside designers. And it's so critically important to understand that there are very few women in the process of the product development cycle. If you're sourcing and buying from Asia and from the US for that matter, there's very few women designers in the process or in the system at all. And so there isn't a lot of checks and balances. And this is our way of how we've done it. And so this episode is really just about getting you that gender blend design and understanding what it is and why it matters. We're going to have future episodes where we're really going to dive into gender bias and all sorts of things, but we just want to give you that refining and defining definition of what that is.

So we want to share with you the audio track from a video we recorded some time ago, a few years ago. A few years ago, on this subject. And it is, you know, another one of those important topics, Evergreen, still relevant today. And so we just wanted to, you know, put a little context on it for you here. And then we're going to go and play that for you. And I hope you enjoy it. I think for us, because we work together and we're married together, and it's really been that way for over 20 years. Gender blending for us was sort of natural, but we realized how to use our advantage, right?

Yeah, we just coined the phrase a few years ago, but it's a description of how we've always worked. I mean, at first it sort of started as, you know, kind of like complementary skills. You know, textiles and color, materials and finishes, industrial design and engineering and function. And, you know, that seemed to be a good marriage of skills. And of course, personally, we just enjoyed working together, so that helped as well. But it got to be a competitive advantage, both for us as designers and for our clients. And it got to be making better products, too. I mean, we certainly came out with a unique perspective on the various products that we were assigned over the years. But I think that the big thing about it is that what gender blending represents is really just this wonderful marriage between male and female consumer needs. So you can't always see that when you're designing in a bubble. And so because we design as a team, it works for us.

It's been painfully obvious with companies we've worked with over the years who don't have any women on the design staffs or even the ones that do. The environment at those companies just does not allow for an open and honest debate to take place about what is going to be successful, what the consumer wants.

Yeah. And you know, especially when debate heads to gender argument, you know, it sounds sexist. And, you know, sometimes you're saying these things like, women don't want this. And I almost hate myself for saying that. But at the same time, if somebody's not out there saying that, then that perspective's not being heard. So if you're holding it back, like I always think of that funny scene in the movie what women Want with Mel Gibson, and they're sitting around and they're talking about, I don't know, Tylenol or some ibuprofen, you know, or something like that. And the woman thinks in her head, yeah, but you know, sometimes I take it to fake a headache, and she thinks that, but she doesn't say it. And so I think that that's what happens is that even when you do have a group where there's men and women together, there's self censoring going on because the guy doesn't want to appear sexist about it, and he doesn't want to say something that might get him in HR trouble. And women don't want to appear as women. I mean, a lot of times, especially when you're advocating for needs of moms. The last thing you want is to make your boss aware of the fact that you are a mom. Because then in the back of his.

Head, well, you might go on maternity.

Leave, she's gonna check out, she's gonna be home to get, take her kids to soccer. She's not that this job. And you don't want that when you're up for a promotion. So it happens whether you want it to or not, that sort of self censoring. So we've developed it a way which, because we can be completely honest with each other and the sexism is I guess, acceptable in our workplace, for lack of a better way to say it.

But what I would say is that all of our interests are completely aligned and there isn't the competition or the concern of perception that exists in every corporate environment.

I think also that there's the issue that, you know, while there's a big strong interest in attention to what women want, because everyone knows the demographics that 85% of all retail purchases are bought or influenced by women. So at an executive level, throughout the company, at a sales level, at a buyer level, everyone accepts that and understands that. How you do it and whether or not you're willing to take the risk and say that that's the idea is really, really difficult at a corporate level. And so it's a little too easy to default to what you know, as a male executive, it's safe or you've done a past history. And so those kinds of things all are factor in whether or not the needs of women and the desires of women consumers are represented. And you know, it's one of those things where in our case we have a strong history of having successful products so that it's easier for us to do it than other people. But we also have sort of the two of us as a dynamic of making the presentation and saying women like this and men like this and you know, you have both sides at the same time, the same message. And I think that that, you know, lends a lot of credibility to the designs that we present at any given time.

Well, it's more believable, I think, especially for upper level executives in a corporation who if their internal teams were to say, hey, we need to really do this differently in order to increase our sales to get more women to buy the products, they may have trouble buying it. And maybe those executives would rather retreat to what they know, what they're comfortable with, and that's what sold last year. But they don't realize this may be the key to selling even more and better than they have in the past. And we've seen that, as you said, with examples.

Yeah, we have products that have done exactly that. So the other thing about it is that, you know, a lot of times as an in house designer, they'll present a design idea and it'll be great and it represents female consumer desires. Maybe they've even focus group tested it, which, you know, inherently has its own problems. But you know, you come to this point in which you're presenting something and the question is, well, you know, I think if we do this, it's a niche and they get caught up in the idea that designing for one gender is a niche. But when that gender is 85% of their sales, they have to seriously tamp that down and say that it's non issue and take the risk. But they don't.

Although, I mean, gender blooding is about meeting the needs and appealing to both genders. Right?

Yeah. We shouldn't discount the fact that it goes the other way as well. I mean, we see a lot of male influence on female friendly products, like, you know, traditionally female friendly products. And I may have mentioned that I not a vacuumer, but I don't do the vacuuming, but there are a lot of men who do. And so all of a sudden the vacuum has changed, it's become more manly, it's, you know, becoming.

Yeah, exactly. So that dynamic changes because, you know, who wants to be vacuuming with a pink vacuum or you know, a purple one? They want something that, you know, looks like a tool, that it is. So it's changed in and of itself that because there's a lot more participative homes that there are, you know, participative genders that there's a lot of that going on as well. So it does go both ways.

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