Retailer Sees More Effective Results With New Product Development Process

A home décor superstore was going through a great expansion in store count and product assortment. In addition to the expansion, the retailer wanted to increase margins by designing more products in-house under the company’s brand name. Due to the speed of the expansion, many of the day-to-day product development processes were still handled with a small company mindset without clarity on specific roles and responsibilities.

The company had created a design and sourcing department, but due to the unclear roles, every product area performed the product development process differently, and many associates were confused about their specific job functions. To support further expansion of stores and increased sales, a standardized product development process with clearer roles and responsibilities was needed.

To fully understand the company’s product development process and associated pain points, the Parker Avery team began by interviewing representatives across the client’s relevant business areas, including design, product development, sourcing, packaging, and merchandising. Parker Avery utilized knowledge from a small, senior-level client core team and information gathered during the interviews to build standardized future-state business process flows for the new end-to-end product development process. Additionally, the team specified the role responsible for each step in the business flow, along with any other necessary changes relative to people, processes, and/or technology.

Throughout the design process, the team also identified and designed key templates for collecting/tracking data that would be standardized as part of the new process.

Parker Avery’s key deliverables during the project included:

• Future-state product development process flows
• High-level change impact analysis
• Key standardized data collection/tracking templates