04. L.L. Bean - Innovation Strategy
Making products more relevant through purposeful design
Delivering guides that provide strategic product evolution, ensuring the brand remains relevant to today's and tomorrow's consumers.
Designers and strategists at Continuum worked with a team at L.L.Bean to help them discover— through ethnographic, anthropologic, and archeological research— that the relationship between consumers and L.L.Bean's product is symbiotic. L.L.Bean consumers embody the brand, and the brand is both a reflection of and celebration of the Bean consumer’s lifestyle. For this engagement, Continuum acted as a translator, allowing the large, active team at L.L.Bean to arrive at a common language that enabled team members from fundamentally different departments to communicate easily and effectively. They also embarked on a new type of design education at the company’s Maine headquarters. Spending three days working with 100 members of the L.L.Bean team, they highlighted the results of the nine month collaboration and provided a clear guide for their utilization. After exploring ninety years of L.L.Bean's unique product and brand heritage, the discoveries that the two companies made will help guide many facets of the company including product development, design and retail strategy. The relationship between Continuum and L.L.Bean continues and remains a unique and enlightening experience for all involved.
"Our project with Continuum has changed the way we design products at L.L. Bean. They gave us a set of tools for designing products. Design is now a strategic competitive business tool that we are putting to work for us." - Fran Philips, Chief Merchandising Officer, L.L. Bean
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