It’s fascinating, most people don’t want to talk about their underwear... and then when you have pizza and wine, they really want to! Jeff Denby
San Francisco based ethical underwear company PACT used design to research and understand their prospective customers, shaping their brand values and defining the way in which their product was developed, shipped and sold.
Read the transcript below.
Jeff Denby, Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder, PACT
Thank you. So, I’ll take you on a bit of a visual diversion now. Thank you very much to the Economist for having, for allowing myself to come and present this little company. I’m sure that most of you are not familiar with PACT, but I will reveal the brand to you over the next 15 minutes. But I’ll just start off by saying that we are a start up underwear company, based in San Francisco – which you can tell by the way I’m dressed. I’m obviously from San Francisco – my business partner said, 'It’s London, you have to wear a suit!'
We believe that change starts with your underwear. And what I will do is walk you through the process of design thinking, which we used to create this business from the ground up: Identifying the problem, the market opportunity and then how we intersect a design business and sustainability to create this brand.
I first want to start off with a slide about values, and this is a slide about values. This is a picture of a factory about two hours outside of Shanghai that I was at, and they make small, little metal pieces that are coated in nickel – they go on handbags and shoes and that kind of thing. When I was there, the locals referred to this as the cancer factory, so you can imagine what the health and safety conditions were like in the factory. And so when my business partner and I decided that we were going to start a business, it didn’t matter…no matter what kind of business it would be, it would exist on values of social and environmental responsibility. And those values would be critical criteria for solving any of the problems that we faced.
And, this was the problem that we looked at. This is what amounted to eco underwear in the marketplace. It’s not very exciting, it’s not very sexy, it’s not very comfortable. But there is a growing set of consumers – especially in the US, and it’s very strong in the UK also – this lifestyle of health and sustainability, or low house consumer segment. It’s about 36 million people in the US at least, who do make purchases based on their values, and this is what was offered to them for their underwear.
So, we saw a problem that existed within the marketplace. But we wondered if in this crowded, brand-heavy space, we could make a difference or even enter? So, I wanted to show you what amounts to innovation within the underwear category. The left hand image is the campaign from 1992 of Mark Wahlberg, the middle image is the campaign with Kellan Lutz from 2010. So in 18 years this is how far we’ve come in underwear.
And then brands compete with one another, with ever larger, more glossier pictures of six packs in black and white. It doesn’t fare much better in the women’s category, where Victoria's Secret dominates the market with these impossible to live up to images of body, which actually tend to commoditise sex and self worth. We wondered if there was a way that we could create a company that actually made people feel good about buying underwear, and spoke to their values when they did.
And, so we had the problem defined, and we knew that there was a market that was ripe for innovation. So we’ve set off on research, and I want to spend some time talking about research, because this was probably one of the most important pieces when we put together this entire business. We spent about a year and a half just on research. It’s often the most overlooked and undervalued part of the design process. I think a really key point – and if you take anything back to your teams, particularly if you have millennials on your teams – tell them that the answer is not on the internet.
We had a professor in business school, who –I went to Berkeley for my MBA and graduated in 2008, so if you have questions about what it’s like to be in an MBA programme, please ask me, I have a lot of opinions about it! – but we had a professor who said, 'The answers are not in the building, please leave the building.' And, so we left the building for a year and a half. We talked to as many different people as we could about their underwear. It’s really quite fascinating. Most people don’t want to, and then when you have pizza and wine, they really want to talk about their underwear! So we did do focus groups, which I know a lot of people aren’t keen on focus groups, but you can do them in a way that creates a data point, and this is all about amalgamation of data points.
We went to trade shows. We actually snuck into all the trade shows in Las Vegas and New York – because we couldn’t afford the entrance fees – and posed as stores to find out what it was like to be sold the product, and have that experience of a buyer. We talked, we went to every single store in New York and San Francisco, and also in the Mid West, that sold underwear, to understand what it was like to be in those stores. We actually stalked around Macey’s underwear department, watching people purchase underwear. It was 'No, you cannot help me, nice lady with the underwear in the women’s underwear section!' And then, we talked to a number of underwear experts, and the interesting thing is that the people that we did speak to, either became investors, consultants and in one case is now an employee of the company.
We entered two business plan competitions, and we basically told anybody who would listen to us at Berkeley that we wanted to start an underwear company. We became the underwear guys and it was amazing, when you are so incredibly open with your business idea, how connected you will find yourself. The work of research culminated in a project with the California College of Arts, where we worked with art students to create prototypes – really, really early prototypes – and this caught the eye of designer Yves Béhar, who is the designer of One Laptop Per Child, the Jawbone headset, and other iconic projects. He said, 'I can bring this concept to life. It’s design that can bring all of this research to life in a totally different way.' And I loved the fact that he said all of these things, which is very much like Yves... 'No, I said stories bring design to life!'
And so, this is PACT. We are a men’s and women’s underwear brand, and for each one of our collections, we partner with non-profit activist organisations. Then we work with an artist to design a print that’s inspired by the mission of that group. It’s not slogan wear, it’s this meeting of art and fashion and design and sustainability. All of the product is organic cotton. It’s fun, it’s playful. None of these people are professional models, in fact, most of them – the girl at the beginning actually, she’s a PhD student at Berkeley. Even our models have stories, and it’s a different way for us to showcase the product... entirely.
And, I think this, and so when it comes to the product itself, I think this is a really important statement: For consumers, choices are made by balancing the need for evolution with the force of habit. Being innovative doesn’t necessarily mean vaulting your consumer into a completely new and uncomfortable space, and forcing it upon them, because damn it, this is innovation, and you’re going to like it. It can be extremely simple. And so PACT is – on purpose – extremely simple. 97% of the underwear sold in America is cotton, therefore we didn’t use some sort of new eco fibre that made people freak out, we used organic cotton, because that’s what people feel comfortable in.
Our cuts are very democratic. It’s extremely comfortable, it’s meant to be your everyday underwear. The innovation though is in the brand experience. And these are some of the prints that we’ve released, and every one of these prints has a story. Every one of these prints is designed by a different artist. They’re connected to different non-profits, and in fact, part of our business model is that we give 10% of everything, of every pair sold back to support the organisations that we work with.
We have a really exciting programme coming up where we’ve partnered with the Green Belt Movement, which is based here in the UK, and we’ve started to develop a really programmatic experience for our consumers. The woman on the left here is Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and her organisation plants trees in Africa and at the heart of it it's really is a women’s empowerment organisation.
The man on the right is David Adjaye, one of the world’s most famous architects. He has designed this underwear print, this fig leaf print for Wangari's organisation. PACT is launching this programme around Earth Day and planting an entire forest in Kenya based on the sales of the product. So the campaign is not an asterisk at the bottom of a giant poster, this is the entire campaign. The product, the organisation, the action day of the company all is integrated into one – and it’s a story that consumers can really connect to.
I want to make a comment about our factory as well. We knew that if we wanted, if we had these certain values we had to start at the very base of the supply chain, and so we found a factory in Turkey that manufactures organic cotton, and solely organic cotton, and so they really actually mean it. Everything happens within a 100 mile radius in Turkey, from the growing of the organic cotton to the final finished product. So it’s interesting that we are working within a very regionalised, localised supply chain, yet we are this company based in California. So, it’s the idea of thinking globally and finding ways that you can act locally within that global supply chain.
We actually might be the only garment company in the world that puts our factory’s name right on every pair of underwear: 'Responsibly made in Turkey at Egedeniz Textile.' We believed that transparency was extremely important in our business, and it’s connecting the consumers to the product in a way that they’ve never been connected before. This is sort of akin to knowing the farm where your tomatoes are grown – it's finding meaning where generally there is no meaning.
And, just another quite story about design and how we designed our way out of plastic in the entire process. This is how the bags are shipped, or the underwear is shipped, inside these little baggies. If you know apparel, every single garment in the world is manufactured, or it’s shipped in it’s own individual plastic bag from a factory. You may never see it, but it was there at one time – it’s millions if not billions of plastic bags every year.
We didn’t feel comfortable with that as a business, but we knew we just couldn’t ship underwear all over the place and we needed a way to have it stored, for fulfilment and have it identified. So at the factory we realised that we could increase the yield on our cutting table and also use scraps off the cutting floor to create these little baggies, and so we managed to design our way out of plastic entirely in our process. And so consumers have these little reusable bags, and this simple little recyclable tag for all the SKU [Stock Keeping Unit] information for picking and packing.
What then we discovered was that consumers got these bags and decided to do things with them, which is what we always hoped. But they also decided to send us pictures of them doing things with these bags, and I’m showing the ones that I can show. When you run an underwear company, you’d be very surprised about what you end up receiving. But it was really great fun for us to discover that people were so engaged in the product – in the packaging. The thing that people throw away most of the time was causing consumers to be creative.
And speaking of packaging, we certainly didn’t want to ship a mountain of trash to our customers, and so what we did was find a way to get rid of all of this garbage. And this is what we ship underwear to people in, it’s a 100% compostable material, it works perfect for our pick and pack – we have a distribution centre in Chicago. The label goes on here and the label and the adhesive are compostable, so a consumer opens up the package, pulls out this underwear. This is compostable, this is recyclable and this is reusable – and so this experience is much different than ordering something online, than the typical experience.
And, I’ll just finish with one of the pictures that I can show. And it’s amazing to see how engaged people become with the brand, when you give them a product that they are excited about, and has more meaning for them. We always wondered, we struggled with this idea about not having a visible product, how would people know? And, it’s people really want to show us their underwear – they want to show each other their underwear. They’re excited about this product, and so we continue to evolve ways that we can engage the customer. And so it’s through this process of research – research, ideate, prototype, and feedback that we based our entire company.