A new way of understanding the customer, for fibre manufacturers

This paper describes a collaborative research project run as part of the UK based Textile & Clothing Industry Forum, that aimed to investigate new ways of understanding the end customer. In deciding to ‘speak’ to the end customer, the fibre manufacturer Tencel Limited made a radical move to break away from the traditional structure of the apparel supply chain. This paper describes how a combination of a Kano questionnaire and empathic design techniques developed for the automotive industry were effectively used to gather new insights into how customers really perceived Tencel’s fibre, and enable the product development team to ‘walk in the shoes’ of the people they design for. The paper concludes that applying these techniques to the textiles industry is a very effective way of obtaining rich and genuine opinions from the end customer and saw that the ‘raw’ video data generated proved to be a very successful way of communicating with senior management.