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.
For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.
In the first of a series of articles covering the three pillars of our FemTech philosophy, we discussed inclusivity. Here, we move on to experience-led design, before ending with the smart use of technology.
Product innovation is shifting focus – from making things to designing seamless experiences. An experience-led design process leads to simple, intuitive, and enjoyable solutions, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.
How a user feels when using a product or service is becoming as important (if not more so) than the solution itself. More than ever, themes such as brand ethical position, purpose, and sustainability credentials are influencing where consumers place their cash and their loyalties. To address this, FemTech innovators must do three things:
Understanding what drives change in the consumer and healthcare space is vital. The challenge for FemTech innovators is to understand how these factors will affect user expectations and behavior.
Take environmental factors: ‘flushability’ has long been a selling point for hygiene products, such as wipes and sanitaryware. However, some manufacturers have drawn historical criticism for stretching the technical definition of flushable to what may be sent on its way with the press of a lever. ‘Solubility’ is a more meaningful definition in the context of the environment and related consumer aspirations. These criteria are determined by industry standards such as Water Industry Specification (WIS) 4-02-06, ‘Fine to Flush’, and other standards with similar objectives across different international legislative jurisdictions.
Sanitary disposal bag firm Fab Little Bags is banking on consumer sentiment changing amid increasing awareness of water pollution. By providing a way to dispose of a tampon in a way that aligns with changing environmental beliefs – binning is better than flushing – it removes eco-guilt and improves the end-user experience.
Regulation is another factor that could affect user experience. If users know that a product, such as a fertility monitor, has been medically approved, they may feel more confident when entrusting it with a potentially life-changing task.
User experience isn’t limited to using a product or service but encompasses the whole consumer journey, including product research, purchase, delivery, unboxing, and after-life.
Consumers have ‘Moments of Truth’ during this journey – key points when they form an impression of a brand – and emotional and social drivers can have equal, if not overriding influence, over functional ones. The Zero Moment of Truth occurs during pre-purchase research. The intimate wellbeing e-commerce platform, Bloomi, which screens every product against a checklist of banned ingredients to ensure they meet its clean standards, recognizes the importance of this stage. The attention to the customer experience is continued with the promise of delivery in discreet packaging. Bloomi has designed a customer experience free of anxiety about harmful ingredients and privacy by considering elements of the user journey beyond use.
User experience isn’t the remit of front-end innovation alone. Harnessing a multi-disciplinary team allows for a wealth of experience, perceptions, and viewpoints to be incorporated into the end-to-end design process. For example, our designers and engineers accompanied our research team to hear first-hand the frustrations women have when undertaking a breast cancer biopsy. This ensured that we could design an accurate medical tool and an empathetic user experience.
Certain environments, such as innovation sprint programs and start-up incubators, foster multi-disciplinary design. FemTech Labs, the first FemTech accelerator in Europe, is one example. It brings together experts, investors, and business coaches to kickstart FemTech businesses. The FemTech Lab accelerator program is short and intense, supplying opportunities for participants to grow quickly and sustainably by drawing on the expertise of its comprehensive interdisciplinary network.
As we’ve seen from the above examples, many FemTech companies are already prioritizing experience-led design as part of their development process. One of the mentioned case studies, Fab Little Bags, doesn’t ostensibly have any tech in it, which brings us to our upcoming article: the smart use of technology.
For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.
The recent move by the UK medicines regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), to enable women to pick up hormone replacement therapy (HRT) treatment from a pharmacy without a prescription should be applauded. If rubber-stamped, thousands of women over the age of 50 who suffer from vaginal dryness will no longer need a trip to their doctor for treatment. However, a successful move from prescription (Rx) to over-the-counter (OTC) drug isn’t just a case of administrative reclassification; design also plays an essential part in mitigating risks.
On February 2 2022, the MHRA opened consultation on a proposal to make the prescription-only estradiol vaginal tablet, Gina10, available as a pharmacy medicine. To qualify, a drug must fulfill the following:
This last item isn’t a factor of the medicine’s efficacy but mainly of how it is used. The task of helping meet this criterion falls to design. In the absence of a prescribing doctor, factors such as packaging usability, information, instructions, and labeling must step in to support the pharmacist and empower the consumer to make safe and informed choices.
The commercial opportunity enabled by such redesign is growing – the global Rx to OTC switch market was valued at US$ 33 billion in 2020 and is predicted to expand by over 5% each year between 2021 and 2031.
This will require an industry mindset shift from relying on doctors to pharmacists or consumers themselves. As demonstrated by the widespread adoption of home lateral flow tests during the COVID-19 pandemic, design can be an enabler. Suddenly, the public was expected to carry out and report on a process that previously (most likely) would have been the domain of a medical professional.
We became de facto lab technicians overnight, swabbing younger patients and recording results at the kitchen table. Design was central to the scheme’s success, from letterbox-sized kits to step-by-step graphical instruction books. Lateral Flow Technology made in-home results that would once have been the domain of well-equipped labs, available in minutes.
Their user-friendliness was improved in design iterations, with the introduction of nose-only swab kits and all-in-one buffer solution tubes. Of course, if the tests had been rolled out without the time and cost pressures of a global pandemic, the intuitiveness and usability of the product-pack experience could have been improved. For example, the ever-confusing ‘C’, which clearly means ‘Control’ to scientists, raises the risk of erroneous reporting if interpreted as ‘COVID-19’ by others.
The good news for most pharma companies considering an Rx to OTC switch is that there is time to optimize this experience, thanks (or no thanks) to an often-lengthy reclassification process.
The evolution of the OTC user experience can be demonstrated by another landmark for women’s health: the reclassification of the morning-after pill. When the pill became available in UK pharmacies in 2001, women had to endure a face-to-face interview with a pharmacist in a private side room (which only made the whole process more indiscreet and potentially a barrier to freedom of health choices.) Today, people can order online from multiple consumer-friendly websites for next-day delivery.
Telehealth website ForHims, founded in 2017, achieves the same for men seeking treatment for highly emotive personal problems such as hair loss and erectile dysfunction. An easy-to-navigate website encourages users to fill out a five-minute questionnaire sent to a clinician to approve the requested treatment. Available drugs include Sildenafil and Viagra Connect, which became OTC treatments in the UK in 2018.
The ability to zip into a pharmacy and pick up HRT will be life-changing for many women. There are many candidate drug opportunities with the potential to ‘switch’ in the future, which can only be a good thing for consumers. The design industry will play a critical role working in pharma and regulatory partnerships to ensure this evolving landscape and the packaging and surrounding experience are optimized to best inform and empower those it seeks to benefit.
There were two victories in the MHRA’s announcement that it’s seeking to reclassify Gina10, an HRT treatment for vaginal dryness, as a non-prescription drug.
The first is that the medical industry is waking up to accessibility needs in healthcare, particularly for women. This group has significantly less free time than men to organize and attend a doctor’s appointment. OTC treatment will make a difference to the 80% of menopausal women who contend with the impact of vaginal dryness on their quality of life.
The second is the medical industry’s increasing willingness to develop a product that addresses the sexual wellness of menopausal women, a traditionally taboo subject. Moreover, the media are willing to talk about this advance for women constructively without the titillating headlines we might have seen in the past.
Both these points mark substantial progress in advancing equality in women’s healthcare.
Welcome to the first in a series of articles outlining the three pillars of our FemTech philosophy: inclusion, experience-led design, and the smart integration of technology. Here, we start with inclusion, a crucial topic for success in innovation.
While there are initiatives to ensure gender diversity in the boardroom, there’s rarely the same in product development. This need for equilibrium has historically often been overlooked in market research and product testing, resulting in design that misses a proportion of end-users. For example, it wasn’t until 2011 that female crash test dummies were introduced in the US.
There are three steps to achieving inclusivity in end-to-end innovation:
We use an Insights for Innovation approach underpinned by the ‘jobs to be done’ perspective. This focuses on understanding a task or ‘job’ independently of any existing solutions used to achieve it. This means we start with the problem rather than the solution. For example, our starting question is: ‘What needs might a couple have when trying for a baby?’ (the jobs), rather than ‘How can we design a biometrics tracker to gauge fertility?’ (a solution).
This solution-agnostic approach involves defining a ‘job’ in terms of the user’s functional, emotional, and social needs, for example:
An excellent example of a solution that has fulfilled these needs is Inne. This fertility monitoring system uses saliva to detect ovulation. Saliva analysis can help women increase the chance of falling pregnant (functional need) by identifying the fertile window each month. It offers clear feedback to reduce anxiety around the results (emotional need) and comes in a discreet format, allowing women to keep their fertility journey private, if they wish to.
FemTech teams must take research beyond quantitative surveys to truly have a clear idea of a woman’s needs. This requires in-depth qualitative interviews to understand women as part of a contextual system. This recognizes that women don’t buy a product because of who they are; no two women are the same; the same person can have different needs in different contexts.
We believe the team behind the breastmilk expresser Elvie Pump took this approach by considering the context of when it would be used, for example, while running after a child or in the workplace. This revealed needs far beyond extracting milk.
Historically, breast pumps have been cumbersome and noisy, with long tubes that significantly restrict movement. On the other hand, Elvie Pump’s design is hands-free, silent, cordless, and easy to clean. By addressing context, the design became a market leader in the US and UK.
Understanding the ‘job to be done’ as part of an ecosystem helps multi-disciplinary teams consider the experience of other key stakeholders.
Take the example of contraception; a heterosexual couple might have the same emotional need to ‘feel like contraception is natural’. However, to one, it could mean hormone-free cream; to the other, it might mean no physical intervention at all (for example, relying on a fertility monitor). Addressing the need from different perspectives ensures the solution is meaningful, intuitive, and enjoyable for everyone it impacts.
The Maven Clinic is a telehealth platform that offers fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and family care services. It caters to what would largely be considered female needs. However, 30% of its members are men. Founder Kate Ryder is careful not to exclude them when she talks about the platform. Rather than referring to Maven Clinic as FemTech, she defines her mission in terms of “people” to ensure that all members feel included.
As these examples show, inclusivity is an essential ingredient of FemTech success. The following articles in our series will cover why experience-led design and the smart integration of technology are equally important.
For more on how to design inclusive, experience-led FemTech products that meet the real needs of women, contact Cambridge Design Partnership.
