Process - The Handbag Reimagined

“Pilot Projects Design Collective LLC is a design and consulting firm founded on the belief that small things, well designed, can catalyze big changes. The firm is made up of professional designers, strategists, and craftspeople, all skilled at creating concrete solutions to challenging problems.”

As the firm’s Research & Design intern, I was assigned a special project conceptualized by PilotProject’s founder, Scott Francisco.

My ultimate responsibility was to realize his vision from sketch to store - that is, bringing his product idea to life, with the potential of actually selling the final result in the real marketplace.

CLUTCH. TOTE. SATCHEL. CROSS-BODY. Today’s handbags come in all shapes, sizes, and forms. And whether it’s to complete an outfit or to simply hold one’s things, they provide value - functional and aesthetic - to their wearers.

But what if another ability could be added to the handbag’s value set, an unfulfilled one that solves size problems and enhances personalization for its wearer?

In The Handbag Reimagined, we approached the handbag through an architect’s perspective - that is, understanding design results to be composed of several layers, with each being highly susceptibleto change.

It involved numerous backtracking and referral to previous project stages. It required approaching the project from a systemic point of view - that is, acknowledging the process as a flexible, holistic one, in which every part within it would be an evolved form of previous ones. And of course, along this winding road to design solutions, there were many challenges and serendipitous discoveries...

It was then time to put pencil to paper and let abstract ideas evolve into hand-drawn sketches. These two-dimensional representations of the innovative concept allowed for a better understanding of its limitations and possibilities. It provided for the testing of multiple design trajectories and potential solutions. Sketching is a quick, cheap, and easy way to develop and play with rough mock-ups of more intricate design schemes.

Like sketches, prototypes are used to communicate design intent. In Project II, the first physical draft of the design was created. Its main purpose was to serve as a “proof � of the overall design concept, as it was important to gauge the feasibility of expectations before proceeding further. Prototype I, constructed from crude materials in order to accommodate for quick iteration and easy exploration of design alternatives, also served as a visual reference to better assess the aesthetic qualities of the handbag.

Prototype I was advanced to a nylon webbing version, or Prototype II, in order to provide designers with a more functional model, one that’s a closer representation of the envisioned product. Having such a working prototype at hand allowed for further validation of previously proposed design solutions.

Strategic designers must work at the intersection of business acumen and creativity. Now that value had been created through ideation and prototyping, the next step was to capture, communicate, and deliver value that is, to consider pricing, product placement, and promotional tactics, respectively. The result: a marketing strategy which (a) thoroughly examined the current marketplace setting; (b) created a profile of our target customer; and (c) provided a blueprint for the possible trajectories of promotional implementations.

The goal was to communicate in a visual stimulating way the multi-functional abilities of our product. The ad invites the viewer to guess: “Is this the same bag?� by hinting at such a possibility through the symmetries found in the two scenes.

Product photography is just as important as advertising campaigns in enticing customers to buy a product. These photos need to communicate a product’s aesthetic elements as well as its functional capabilities. This requires shots of the product at various angles- in essence, “styling” and positioning the product as if one were working with a human model.