Cambridge Design Partnership was recently featured in The Times with our Co-Founder Matt Schumann and Head of Mechanical Engineering Stuart Curtis discussing how our innovative solutions are helping clients speed up time to market and enhance the lives of those they serve.
A Device Shining a Light on Usher Syndrome
Learn more about our involvement in the remarkable Usher syndrome awareness campaign.
Over the last few years, Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) has developed a strategic partnership with MAS Holdings, South Asia’s largest apparel tech company.
Our most recent collaboration has been with Femography, the FemTech division of MAS Holdings, which started out as a small team with diverse expertise, and has evolved into the FemTech arm of the Company. Femography leverages 35 years of apparel tech expertise and works with some of the world’s biggest brands to create innovative apparel solutions that focus on addressing the unseen and unmet needs of women. These innovative solutions are breaking taboos through their textile technology and mission-led practices. The partnership between CDP and Femography combines ingenuity and cross-disciplinary approaches to rapidly create and expand access to impactful women’s health solutions.
Our partnership with Femography was focused on the identification of white space opportunities within menstruation. This leveraged our combined passion and commitment to innovation within the women’s health space. The outcome resulted in a creative solution pipeline which has extended and elevated Femography’s product pipeline.
In this article, Abby Scheer, an Industrial Designer and FemTech Lead at CDP, reflects on the importance of strategic partnerships with Femography’s Tehani Renganathan and Ginnymarie Mendis, and shares exciting key learnings for successful innovation across the FemTech space.
Strategic partnerships provide multi-faceted value, especially in driving innovation that helps transform lives. The partnership between CDP and Femography includes a shared vision that challenges taboos and pre-existing social norms surrounding the female body and increases the discovery and development of impactful solutions.
“We partnered with companies and consultants who really shared that vision, they were vested in this journey with us – and it is that success that we see the fruit of today.” – Tehani Renganathan, Chief of Strategy, Marketing and New Ventures, Femography
Backed by science and approved by women, Femography designs everyday lifestyle solutions across all phases of the feminine journey – from menarche to menopause and everything in-between. Femography’s solutions are created to help women live confidently in their bodies, but many taboos continue surrounding feminine health and well-being.
“Our efforts aren’t focused on creating just a regular clothing/apparel solution, but to also look at solving unmet and undermet needs of our consumers. We have understood the many pain points they journey through, and we are continuously working towards giving them a passive or active solution that can restore normalcy for them.” — Ginnymarie Mendis, Chief of Consumer and Product Innovation, Femography.
Strategic collaborations with insightful partners increase the breadth and depth of discovery and development of impactful solutions – this is especially important in the FemTech space where research and funding is often lacking. Femography approached CDP for expertise in the consumer health and technology space, and together we met this menstrual health challenge head-on.
Drawing on her firsthand experience, Ginny shared how a successful partnership should have “…mutual trust, respect, and a shared vision and commitment to the journey”. When it comes to innovation, it is also important to have a creative partner who can help bring early ideas and concepts to life as fast as possible. CDP’s innovation, efficiency, and approach were a foundational aspect of the partnership formed between CDP and Femography.
“We wanted to bridge our strengths with your [CDP’s] strengths and come up with even greater solutions and innovations that could really have an incremental impact on our planet” – Ginnymarie Mendis.
Femography also recognizes that strategic partnerships are key to successfully expanding its existing portfolio into everyday periodwear and even period swimwear in a meaningful way. When looking to expand into new customer markets across, for example, US, EU, Australia, and Asia, fine-tuning product categories is key.
The FemTech knowledge, cross-cutting sector expertise, and user-centered design approaches which CDP brings to their strategic partnerships has helped to unlock how existing solutions can meet users’ needs and support the rapid discovery of transformative solutions for growing women’s health issues.
Reflecting on our recent collaboration, Tehani highlighted the exciting and anticipated new opportunities which can be created and unlocked due to our partnership.
“The CDP and Femography partnership will help create and unlock access to non-medical alternatives to help women better manage their health. An important objective includes exploring a broad product landscape, creating a pipeline of global solutions mapped to symptoms and other pain points women struggle with.” -Tehani Renganathan.
Equally, Tehani reflected on a fantastic launch that the Femography team is exceptionally proud of. Become, the consumer-facing menopause brand of Femography that was launched in the UK almost 7 years ago, was transformational in helping to get the menopause conversation started. Become frequently partners with other brands and organizations to lead change, providing another great example of the importance of innovation collaborations. This year Femography has expanded the Become footprint to the US market to leverage American women’s vocal conversations on menopause, increase awareness of the topic, and provide a solution to women who need it.
Much more work is still needed to address the health needs of women in the UK and US, and even more so in many developing and underprivileged communities. The collaboration between CDP and Femography continues to help innovate and expand the reach of unique solutions in women’s health across each sub-sector market. Together, CDP and Femography will strive to collaboratively innovate meaningful products, to help bring greater health, dignity, and confidence to all feminine bodies.
In an exciting first half of 2022, our FemTech team attended and presented at conferences, including the Reproductive Health Innovation Summit in Boston and the Women’s Health Innovation Summit in Basel. We’ve enjoyed fascinating conversations at events like these, covering everything from whether ‘FemTech’ is a useful term to how FemTech can manage the gender data gap. In this article, we share our responses to some of those questions which stood out to us.
Yes – and no. The term ‘FemTech’ has been a valuable tool since Ida Tin coined it in 2016, but it can narrow the field of focus. FemTech gives investors a framework and ‘safe’ vocabulary to discuss women’s health issues – some people find “I’m investing in FemTech” easier to say than “I’m investing in a period tracker.” A Google search on the term shows that it has evolved into a rallying point for like-minded people in the industry to find each other and drive innovation. At CDP, we view FemTech as a design philosophy underpinned by inclusivity, experience-led design, and the smart integration of tech (or intentional absence of tech), which we overlay on wide-ranging areas of innovation.
We can look at how FemTech has grown due to an increasing consumer focus on sustainability. Menstrual cups, for example, have been around for a long time but only recently become a mainstream product. In 2018, the global menstrual cups market amounted to an estimated US$1.2 billion – it’s expected to reach US$1.89 billion by 2026. This increase reflects a massive shift in consumer attitude towards prioritizing sustainability over the last few years. But it also shows the success of products that meet user needs. Menstrual cups generally need to be changed less frequently than conventional tampons, so they meet user needs and offer a sustainable alternative. [1] At CDP, our user-centered design approach means we design for people, first understanding what they are trying to achieve, before translating contextual insight into solutions.
Historically, medical studies have often assumed the male body as the default, ignoring that women have different physiologies and responses to disease. This has resulted in a lack of data focusing on women’s needs, which puts FemTech innovators at a disadvantage. On the other hand, it also presents an opportunity for the industry to create valuable proprietary data which can be shared to further the understanding of women’s health. Take the vastly under-researched area of female sexual pleasure – the first comprehensive anatomical study of the clitoris was only published in 1998. [2] For Goodness Sake is the parent company of OMGYes, an education app focused on female sexual pleasure. In partnership with Indiana University and Kinsey Institute researchers, it researches people’s most intimate and vulnerable experiences. The results are published in peer-reviewed journals and (to quote their literature) “turned into honest and friendly online products” – the best of both worlds.
The most important thing is not to treat each stage in the innovation journey as a discrete process but to communicate between disciplines and, critically, with consumers and patients – put them at the heart of the innovation process, and validating the new product or service experience. This will ensure that, for example, manufacturing decisions won’t negatively impact user requirements. Our advice is to apply our FemTech philosophy of inclusivity, user-centered design, and the smart integration of tech to a robust end-to-end innovation process, such as CDP’s Potential Realized. This comprises six steps: opportunity definition, concept creation, concept realization, product realization, manufacturing realization, and life-cycle management.
Many FemTech products sit with one foot in healthcare and the other in consumer. Knowing which category your product falls into is key to avoiding unexpected regulation (our white paper on FemTech regulation has more information on this). Consider regulation early, as compliance is complex and expensive to retro-engineer. Negative PR following a regulatory oversight could be catastrophic for a new company or brand, which might otherwise have been successful. And even if you find your product is exempt from regulation, it’s good practice to take a risk-based approach to design to ensure your product remains safe and enjoyable for its end users.
As passionate advocates of inclusive design, we’re always happy to talk about FemTech. Please drop us an email if you have any further questions: womenshealth@cambridge-design.com
As we are exposed to new sensory experiences, we develop deep seated cognitive constructs that in turn further influence our decision-making – perhaps the illusive sixth sense!
Our perceptions of flavour and fragrance in our food and drink is one of the most hard-wired responses. Initially designed to help the human species survive and reproduce by finding things safe to consume, after the more recent industrialisation of food it has become an opportunity to engineer the parameters that influence preference, liking and consumption.
Today an entire industry has grown up around flavours and fragrances; sensory sciences came of age as a discipline to help objectively understand, parameterise, and engineer the specific attributes that impact on our choices. Sensory Panels, expert groups of individuals, carefully trained to objectively parameterise different formulations are core to the development of new product specifications; from defining our favourite toothpaste mouth tingle, to building corporate confidence in the transition to a sugar substitute in a $bn snack brand (our team have worked on both!), it is likely that a sensory expert will have been involved along the way!
But is this, in many ways standardised approach, limiting us? Are opportunities being missed to leverage this scientific rigour and usefully blend it with subjective consumer perception? How should sensory science engage with global trends, omni-channel product experiences, the circular economy, declining brand loyalty and steady growth of e-commerce?
At CDP we are working in a number of ways (two of which we’ve outlined below) to make product specifications more commercially effective, and more sensorially affective, and we had the chance to display some of our work at the Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium last year.
Online grocery shopping is growing rapidly, and yet the physical pack interaction experience has always been central to in-store decision-making. While traditional sensory sciences often bias us towards flavour and fragrance, the old proverb reminds us that the first bite is with the eye, and CDP’s team believe that other senses can be leveraged through intelligent packaging design to amplify under-utilised sensory cues. Our Front End Innovation team have developed a methodology to effectively translate formulation attributes into packaging parameters to help reinforce the anticipation of consumption at the first moment of truth. We have worked closely with the makers of some of the most famous mayonnaise and spreads brands in the world to, for example, elicit, create and reinforce positive haptic cues in the jar lid, giving confidence in the seal and re-seal experience, and to premiumize the acoustic signature of the thin-walled pack-lid on repeat opening. Even the maker of dry, powdered soups and bouillons was able to leverage packaging parameters that positioned the product closer to more desirable attributes of naturalness and freshness. Our team includes scientists and engineers, which means we can provide a rigorous quantitative technical specification for that enhanced, consumer-validated pack experience!
Involve them precisely because they are not trained panellists; involve them in Sprints, and co-creation and in-home sensory research, as well as more traditional central location or lab testing! It can be extremely illuminating to involve consumers in exploratory formative research, rather than just for validation of what a sensory panel have advised or specified. Involving them early on can lead to serendipitous moments where new connections are made – leading to new value propositions, and opportunities for brand extension. It can also lead to surprising revelations that highlight some limitations of objective sensory science methods, when a consumer responds to small, almost imperceptible changes to a pack design in an unexpected way.
In many industries, the manufacturing and regulatory lead times and consumer loyalties associated with changing formulations can be far more restrictive than changing pack design; our work has demonstrated time and again that we can influence consumer perception of key formulation attributes such as efficacy, healthiness, freshness, and strength, even prior to first use, by making changes solely to the packaging look, feel, and sound.
New products and experiences are coming onstream all the time, and for some of these a sensory panel base line or ‘normal’ specification does not yet exist; we have recently been working on an entirely new category of product which demanded a new sensory protocol to be created, and which at the heart of it considered how the device and formulation had to work in harmony to create the consumption experience. We were excited to pioneer a collaboration between our team and affective methodologies, with those of a more traditional flavours and fragrance partner, and the result is an optimised, category transforming product-formulation experience.
As a sensory industry, we need to re-imagine the relationship between the formulation and the devices or packaging containing and dispensing it; it is a closer and more mutually symbiotic relationship than past practice gives credit to. Through this insight we have more opportunity than ever before to positively engineer a multi-sensorial consumer experience that truly delights.
