Launching a new product to the world can be intimidating. No matter how much you love your own idea, all that really matters is if the market (real people) like your new product idea enough to spend their hard-earned money on it.
As we were first discussing the idea for the ultimate yard shoe, we had to ask ourselves "what makes a great shoe for working in the yard"? I had my thoughts, but we were not about to blindly develop a new product based on a "hunch".
We decided that we needed to find out what different people wanted and needed in their ideal all-purpose yard shoe. With this goal in mind, we went out and did market research. We did a lot of market research…over 2 years of research.
We conducted market research surveys, asking homeowners to rank the most important features of this kind of shoe. I talked with owners of shoe stores, to get insight on what customers generally like and don't like in shoes as they try them on in their stores. I spoke with multiple footwear/work boot buyers for major retail chains, which provided insight into what kind of shoes perform the best in their stores, and why. I spoke with a lot of different lawn care/landscape professionals who spend all day working on yards - and they provided some wonderful feedback.
After gathering all this data from various sources (most notably the consumer research survey), we put together a scoring system to rank the importance of different features. It was a very interesting exercise, and we're glad we did it! While some of the features were what we expected, some things surprised us! As I worked with our designer on creating this shoe, these top features drove our decisions. We found that there were eight features that people wanted in a yard shoe – so we needed to figure out how to incorporate all eight.
Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting these 8 most important features on our website, and our Facebook page. This will be a countdown, starting with the 8th most-important feature, and ending with what people told us was the most important. We will let you know what each feature is, and how we designed and developed our shoe around that.
At the end of the day, our goal is to create a yard shoe that people love. And the only way we had a chance of doing that is by listening to what people want. Sign up today to have your voice heard as we continue to develop the best yardwear.
Cheers!
Shawn Langton Founder, CEO – Kujo Yardwear