The handheld mirror category needed a shake up. Mirrors from Goody and other category leaders seemed antiquated—they lacked pizazz and originality. Goody, a Newell Rubbermaid company, asked BOLTgroup to develop a mirror strategy that would reposition Goody as the style and innovation leader in the category. Our team accepted the challenge, but pushed the opportunity a step further by conceiving a group of ingenious products inspired by the ways people use mirrors—a family of little inventions that delivers fresh aesthetics, user delight, and patentable features.

Building a Strategic Point of View

Armed with Goody’s consumer segmentation research our team set out to create meaningful product innovations targeted at each segment—tween girls, adult women, and adult men. Innovation starts with consumer insights, so we went insight mining through our Participatory Design sessions with consumers. From user research to point-of-sale investigation we gained deep appreciation of each consumer segment—how they shopped, what their motivations were, and what unmet needs they had in the mirror category.

What Insights Did We Uncover?

Hunting for a mirror frustrated women when it was time to use a tweezer (ever try tweezing without one?). Tweens liked to collect snapshots of friends around the frame of their mirrors at home. Girls wanted a mirror to sneak a peek of themselves inside their lockers at school.

From Insights to IP

From dozens of insights came hundreds of ideas leading to some 40 product design concepts that were modeled and tested with consumers. Through diligent refinement and engineering our team optimized aesthetics, functionality, and cost. Assisting with coordination of the Asian vendor we helped guide 24 new products though production, launching the So You™ mirror line. The result—in the first year Goody mirror sales increased by 46%, profit growth increased by 2 points, and 16 patents were issued or applied for.