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Design IQ
Managing Director and Creative Director of Design IQ Guy Mathiot spoke to SGB about his new designs for a range of bags specifically with women in mind. The cut, the style, the functionality of the bags has been tailored entirely for female sports enthusiasts, as Guy explains...
Guy Mathiot is a sports designer, and it comes across in his enthusiasm for the products his company Design IQ produces. A range of bags that is genuinely tailored for women - not just the same boxy style as a universal bag but in feminine colours - is available, and SGB - Sports and Outdoor thinks that these could be a big hit for the independent retailer. Well-made, with superb attention to detail... and yes, they are available in pink / black.
SGB: How long has Design IQ been around and what's the actual function of the company?
GM: Design IQ is a design development and supply company. We've been established as a design company since 1985 and the supply side of the business has been established now for about four years.
Our mission statement, if you like, is "identifying the difference that design can make", because identifying the difference that design can make is our mission for our customers. They can buy lots of products from anywhere. Our task is to identify where design can make a difference to their sales, their brand building and their product line. We design and develop collections of bags for ‘active sport' retailers who have enough buying capacity - generally those with over 5 shops have this.
Design IQ has also launched its own line of products and it's the first of a programme of new products and brands that we will be bringing to the market over a number of years based upon the fact that as a design and marketing focused company for many, many years we've identified trends that we think major brands are not filling. In the past we've come up with great ideas then sat and watched market opportunities - like little boats go by and said "ooh that's a good idea" but we've never launched it ourselves. Over a period of time of trying to find customers for our many ideas, we concluded that we should take the Nike adage and 'Just Do It'. So that's why we launched the workplay line of women-specific sports bags.
SGB: What was the thinking behind the line of bags? What is workplay?
GM: workplay is a line of products that has started off with the ethos of respecting and recognising the fact that women are more organised than men. Also women, I think, are less bothered about brand names, much less so than men, and they're far more focused on 'what does the product do for me?'
Over about two years, we did formal research programmes into what women expected from their equipment, and came to the conclusion that women had quite different expectations than men. At that point, having identified that women are busier than men, have a lot more to do than men, and try to do, I think, more in their lives than men, we felt that they deserved to have products that actually fulfilled their expectations. workplay is into creating products for women that respect their demands upon equipment they use day to day, that cover their activities from work, to play, to shop, to travel, to nurture and to pamper. Work, play, shop, travel, nurture, pamper is the workplay mission.
If you think about it, women try to combine a lot of different things. With design in mind, because I'm not a girl I think actually it gives me an advantage because I'm not personal about it, I just listen. So what I set out to do is to listen to what women want and identify their needs and then try and create what I hope are as near as possible perfect expressions of their daily needs. For now the workplay line is starting from the sport perspective. This is one I know well being a fashion sport designer, but it will evolve into all of the other categories that I've described. Every product we design will be technically concise.
SGB: Respecting women's needs as unique is excellent. So why are the bags all pink?
GM: I didn't want to do pink, per se, because I felt it was just too obvious, but that was the designer in me and the commercial fashion industry person in me saying, 'OK, not pink' please!. In fact, our prototype collection was not in pink but when I went out and did lots of personal presentations to everybody from friends to coaches in gyms, to trainers, to retailers, to e-tailers and sold it to them, the unequivocal question I got back from all of them was, "Where's the pink?" Well, I set out to listen to women and because we are a small operation and we had to start somewhere, we chose the colour that I felt would, one, communicate the feminine nature of the products, and two, have the broadest appeal, and that is why in the first instance most of the range is in pink / black.
SGB: Who is workplay's end customer?
GM: She's generally over 20 and has no upper age limit. She's busy. She most likely either runs a home or has a very busy work life, she either has a family or is probably going to have a family. She's not just a yummy mummy, she's more a working girl. She may be living in the city of London or a major city somewhere, Manchester, Birmingham, whatever, and she will be running from work to play. So she wants to be able to take things into the office during the day so she can go and do her sport or activity after work and she needs equipment that doesn't look out of place when she's got to look smart. That's one description.
The second kind of woman may be a full time mum. That doesn't mean she's any less busy. She's probably using her car and she is going to be trying to juggle an awful lot of things and therefore she needs again equipment that is very sleek, uncluttered and will do everything she needs it to do in one place. And that's the essence of a workplay product - it's fully thought out as to the needs of all her activities - and for that, we begin with the gym. The gym bag can be used for everything from gym to travel. It can be tennis. It can be swimming. It can be all sorts of different activities. An awful lot of women run, so that's why in the relatively small workplay launch collection of only five items, one of the items is an innovative women's lightweight runner's bag. We perceive that she's going to go into the office and go to work but she's going to squeeze in 30 minutes after work to go out for a run round the streets, so it's a very core item to us.
SGB: Tell us more about the Goddess bag...
GM: The Goddess bag in a way encapsulates the whole principle of the workplay concept. It has a perfectly sized pocket to take up to size 8 shoes. It has a trainer bag inside so your trainers won't make the inside of the bag dirty. It has a laundry bag inside the bag so you can separate clean and dirty clothes. It has a gravity-operated coin pocket so you always have the means of locking your locker to hand and has a security pocket. It has a rigid base so that when you fold your clothes up you can put them neatly in the bottom. It has a space in the top of the body for documents, and there's also free inside a wash bag which is big enough to take bottles of shower gel, conditioner and shampoo. It's got enough space for all the other pamper type things that a woman might need at the gym. Under the lid is a useful personalisable "packing prompt list" to help you remember to take everything you need .The carrying straps are key; we observed that women don't actually like carrying bags like men do, they like to carry their bags like a handbag. They carry it over their shoulder, they want to tuck it under their arm and that's why the handles on the bags are actually quite long, longer than normal handles on top of the bag so you can actually pop it over your shoulder. And the whole thing is designed to fit perfectly inside the locker. So, again, where's the bag going to be used, what's it going to be used for, what are the various functions she needs? We answered these questions.
We analysed needs for different sporting activities, produced a huge list of everything a woman might want to carry. Then we focused down on what we thought the essential items were and designed the product to meet those needs. It was a very logical process to get to something that I hope is aesthetically pure, clean and pleasing to the eye and yes, pink. In the future we'll have a greater range of colours but initially, we're keeping the range fairly simple. The other colourway right now is grey, lilac and blue.
SGB: Outside of the Goddess, is there anything about the shape, the physicality of the other bags which is essentially female or is it about the function of the bag?
GM: Here's a good example. One of the key products which we've designed is the Racelite bag. The Racelite bag comes again from studying what women when running need. We looked at a brand called Nathan, they make super running bags but they're all geared towards people who are going to do long distance running and need to carry a lot of fluids. The observation I made, is I think that the majority of female runners run probably in the region of three to four times a week and she's fitting it in between getting the kids to school or after office hours. Therefore, her needs are for something light, quick and easy that doesn't get in the way. If you ask any runner do they want to carry a bag, their inevitable answer is, "no, I don't want to carry anything". But your average runner probably does choose that she would like to carry her mobile phone for security, a tiny bit of money for confidence she's got something, maybe an iPod and sometimes water. She wants to carry it comfortably and she wishes it to be totally unobtrusive.
We looked at the runner's bag market and observed that there were some super highly technical long distance running bags, but there was nothing that might be described as a hybrid product for frequent use - and that's what we created in the Racelite. Also there were no runners bags that we could see that were ergonomically cut to fit the female form. If you actually look at a woman's cross section, at her waist and high on her hips, it's a completely different shape from men and all the other runners' bags that we could find were all focused on men. So because I'm a designer and pattern cutter, I got my old dress blocks out, and literally sat down and cut the pattern myself for a woman's shaped runner's bag. That's why when you lay it out flat is quite a strange curvy shape; when you put it on a woman's body, it actually fits perfectly.
The Racelite runner's bag has reflective 360 degrees, so all the way round the bag it has reflective in different places, achieved in quite discreet but notable ways. It has a shaped form that again can be worn high in the waist or lower on the hips. It's very lightweight ( 95grms) and has no additional padding because it's built out of spacer mesh which allows you to have a little bit of bounce in the form, and we've created a clever little stretch mesh pocket on the back which is not designed to carry one thing, it's designed to carry a multitude of different things. One of my observations again was I reckoned the average girl doesn't want to run around carrying a bottle bouncing around on her hips, it's uncomfortable. So we worked out that we reckoned the average girl running after work would probably take a small water bottle, that's what she's going to have to hand. The pocket has a special padded panel behind it which means that anything with any weight is padded against the body and when none of those things are carried, the only extra weight you are carrying is the most minimal stretch mesh pocket you could possibly imagine.
SGB: How are you distributing the bags?
GM: They're being sold to specialist retailers at the moment. Our objective has been to pick out the key retailers that we thought were important in the country and we're only selling to those retailers that we believe have a strong commitment to female customers.
SGB: Is it difficult then, selling these into retail when your background and company structure is basically creative?
GM: It is, but we know that the market exists. There are thousands of women out there who do sport every day but there isn't a very established retail network and there are very few notable female-orientated sports retailers. It's usually something that's done somewhere on the side and what we're trying to do is to avoid the, you know, the nominal pink bag in the corner syndrome and we only want to work with retailers where they do actually have a female focus and support their female customers to find exactly what they need in terms of fit and function.
We're not salesmen who happened to notice that they can sell women's things and went and get a few women's products to sell. We're not a big brand who fancy putting on a pink face or a girly face today. We're designers who did a lot of research and observation and tried to create super products, so therefore we're actually starting from a base of not knowing who all the retailers are and we're having to find out the hard way. It's proving to be a long process to find out who are the suitable retailers that we can support with the products as they evolve - who will also support their own customers and be the sort of place that they will enjoy to go and buy their products.
SGB: What are the RRPs on the line?
GM: The Goddess is £54.99, Minigym is £38.99 (that's a mini kit bag). The back pack is £39.99. The Racelite runner's bag is £21.99 and the Angelwing, that's the dainty little backpack is £23.99.
We've worked on the basis of ensuring our customers get a handsome margin because we know that this is a somewhat specialist product and we want them to make a good margin, so we've set out to give fashion-type margins rather than sport margins so they get higher margins than would be normally expected.
SGB: Have you done any marketing for this? How would you market something so specific?
GM: We aim to be supportive. For instance, there's a gym in our town, a great gym, all women-specific training. We approached the gym who are not retailers and said, you know, you're women-specific, we've got some women-specific products, but they're not in a position to buy and sell. So what we did was we set up a supportive triangle with a local retailer, the gym and ourselves. We placed a display of these bags with explanatory literature free of charge in the gym, on display and invited the girls to look at them and then we set up an agreement that for a limited period of time the members of the gym could go and buy them from the local retailer, so we've been able to drive sales to a local retailer by being pro-active with the gym. You see - many women don't know that there is such a thing as a women-specific gym bag so we've tried to educate and make them aware of this.
The bottom line is independent retailers need fresh products with a point of difference to compete with the JJB's of this world - any retailers reading this interview who would like similar help can give us a call to discuss ways we can help them.
