When I was in retail, one of the brands that we stocked was Icebreaker, from New Zealand.
Icebreaker made socks, clothing and a lot of cool weather, merino wool gear.
Their product was high end: neat and orderly.
And then one day in the mail I got a package. It was from Icebreaker, but I wasn’t expecting a delivery.
I opened it up, and there was this super lightweight running shirt, vented, with bright stitching… Completely different to the other Icebreaker gear.
A little bit extreme even.
Icebreaker typically played it pretty safe. And here they had decided to create an entirely new line of test team gear.
This was pre-market, experimental stuff that was sent out to various retailers or athletes to test and give feedback on.
This allowed the designers to go crazy, push boundaries, find out what didn’t work, and not compromise their reputation as a high quality brand.
Some of the test team gear was great, some of it wasn’t, but this allowed them to innovate and test in a real-world environment.
Innovation can be sticky – it can feel risky to implement change in our day to day routine. Upsetting the status quo is great in theory, but in practice can feel hard.
So, sometimes it’s helpful to create an entirely new platform – a test laboratory with a specific test team, where you get to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks: no risk, no rules, no expectations.
Feeling like it’s safe to experiment, knowing that it can’t collapse our reputation can be the very thing many of us need to take the first step in a new direction.
