Question: Tool which designs clothing automatically.

Clarifying question: Is this a B2B product or B2C product?

Is it specific to gender or age group – say men vs women or children vs adults?

What is the output of this tool? – Just a visual image or step by step method for generating the design?

Customer personas

1. Large clothing companies

2. DIY clothes makers

3. Custom tailoring or folks who are typically not happy with standard products in market like Plus size, very tall/ short people

Of these, the clothing companies are the best bet as they will have a high need for new designs.

Pricing can be based on

1. gender (women clothing say tends to be more complicated than men)

2. volume – pricing slabs based on the volume of designs say 1K designs – USD 1K, 5K Designs – USD 4K, 10K designs – USD -7K etc

3. Variations of output – only basic visualization or more step by step instructions etc.

Another source of revenue could be with providers of raw material where referrals from the product will generate affiliate revenue source.

This is my improved answer:

1. Clarifying Questions

• Can the design of our tool be repetitive? => No

• Do we ensure the copyright of products designed by the tools? => No

• How does it work? => Users can input some information about the clothes they want to design, such as age ranges, gender, style (modern, tradition, …), categories (coat, shirt, …), slogan, text, … . They also can integrate some icons or branding stuff into the product or customize them in several ways.

• What is the goal of the product? => The goal is to personalize clothes.

2. Users & Target Market

• From my point of views, three main groups of people will use our product are:

  • Organization: People in this group are from companies, organizations, communities, and other groups. They want to design their uniforms, but they don’t have specific employees to do this stuff. Their requirements and acceptance criterias are not too high so they can use our product to design their own clothes instead of outsourcing them.

• Mid-class people: People in this group don’t want to use mass-produced clothes, but also don’t want to spend too much money to buy unique or limited-edition clothes from high-end brands. Therefore, the tool helping them design by themselves is the best choice for them to meet their demands.

  • Freelance designer/ design house: People in this group are different from the two above groups. They need a tool and “an assistant” to help them increase their productivity as well as creativity. They not only need unique design outcomes but also want to customize them according to their opinion.

• In my opinion, we should focus on freelance designers /design house first because:

  • Market size: I would assume that the data collected from our data scientist demonstrate that freelance designers and design houses are the most potential market compared to the other two customer segments. The total market in the US is around 3 billion dollars.

  • Market growth: Nowadays, because the clothing fashion requirements from people around the world have gone up remarkably, the number of freelance designers and design companies/startups have also increased rapidly to meet customers’ demands. I think there are more and more designers, especially young designers, using technology to create and modify their design, which helps them a lot to save their time and increase productivity.

  • Profit margin: The cost for creating and improving AI modules does not depend on the number of sales like traditional manufacturing companies, but on the human resources. So our profile margin will rely on the total number of customers. Freelance designers /design houses would be the users using our products most frequently because they have to use our tool to work every single day.

  • Competitors: Design software companies like Adobe are our competitors in this market. Because they are also offering the design software for designers. Their financial, ecosystem and engineers are strong enough to catch on. We can beat them by focusing on our blue ocean, personalizing clothes, instead of other design fields.

  • Company fit:

    • The pain point of our customers: The more designs designers create, the less creativity they have. Because the creativity of an individual has a limit and time for thinking about new products is not short.

    • Our solution: To help them generate the new ideas based on AI and Data collected from a myriad of sources. We provide them the ability to customize the design according to their opinion. Therefore, instead of spending a huge amount of time on thinking about new concepts, they can use our output as a helpful source to get inspiration.

3. Pricing

Clarifying questions:

• Currently, do we have some way to monetize the product? => No

• How much for the COGS (Cost of goods sold)? => Cannot disclosure

I think instead of providing a specific price number, I will focus on the structure of monetization. Because our profile margin and ROI will not rely on the cost of each product, but the total number of customers. Therefore, our top financial goal should be obtaining as many customers as possible. Some solutions that come to my mind is:

• Structuring Prices based on the amount of time (Monthly, Quarterly, and Annually)

• Structuring Prices based on the number of designs

• Structuring Prices based on the number of features

I don’t know exactly what is inside our module, but I will assume that our tool is the same as most data-driven modules. The more data we have the more efficent our tool is. Therefore, we don’t want to limit the number of designs our customers create and we want to prompt our users to create as many as possible. Therefore, Structuring Prices based on the number of designs is not a good choice for us right now.

Time-based price is a good choice for us to encourage designers to create more and more designs within a specific amount of time. Because price is fixed, the more products they design the more profits they make. So I think we should apply the Prices structure based on the amount of time

Because we don’t want to limit our customer segment, so I think we could categorize our prices into different segments. By categorizing prices based on the feature, we can validate which features our users prefer most, so we can spend our resources on the suitable feature instead of diversifying our feature, which is our USP to beat tech giants like Adobe.

We can offer some things like the 1-month free trial to help our customers understand about our product before they pay for it.

In conclusion, The combination between time-based and feature-based pricing would be the best choice for us during this time

Question: If we made a tool, which will design clothing automatically through artificial intelligence, how can you identify the target market and pricing structure?

Answer:

1. Clarifying Questions

• Can the design of our tool be repetitive? => No

• Do we ensure the copyright of products designed by the tools? => No

• How does it work? => Users can input some information about the clothes they want to design, such as age ranges, gender, style (modern, tradition, …), categories (coat, shirt, …), slogan, text, … . They also can integrate some icons or branding stuff into the product or customize them in several ways.

• What is the goal of the product? => The goal is to personalize clothes.

2. Users & Target Market

• From my point of views, three main groups of people will use our product are:

  • Organization

    • People in this group are from companies, organizations, communities, and other groups. They want to design their uniforms, but they don’t have specific employees to do this stuff. Their requirements and acceptance criterias are not too high so they can use our product to design their own clothes instead of outsourcing them.

• • • Market: Nowadays, there are more and more companies and groups that are established and growth really fast because of the trend of community and startup. Therefore, this market is very potential.

• • • Competitors: Companies and organizations often outsource their clothing design to freelance designers, design companies, or uniform companies with some branding requirements like color, logo, slogan, … But the design, communication, and negotiation process takes them a long time to get the sufficient design. Our tool can help them get the design faster than ever. On the other hand, competitors’ ecosystems are the thing we should consider. Because they often connect with other companies in the supply chain to produce end-to-end products.

• • • Company fit: Organization wants to have a unique design for their uniforms because it’s some kind of branding, which suits our product’s goals, “personalize clothes”.

• • Mid-class people

    • People in this group don’t want to use mass-produced clothes, but also don’t want to spend too much money to buy unique or limited-edition clothes from high-end brands. Therefore, the tool helping them design by themselves is the best choice for them to meet their demands.

• • • Market: Nowadays, the life standard has been higher than ever. The number of mid-class people has increased significantly time by time. In developed countries, most people belong to the middle class. Therefore, this is a large potential market we should dig into.

• • • Competitor: Our competitors in this customer segment are limited-edition clothes, freelance designers, hand-made clothes. But the price people have to pay for our competitors to personalize or buy limit-edition is not cheap. And people have to hunt or wait to get their clothes. We can beat them by the speed and price. However, our disadvantages are understanding each type of customer. Because each person has a different mindset and style and our designs are not tangible, it is very hard to provide them a design suiting their style. To do that, we should collect input from them enough to predict nearly precisely customers’ style.

• • • Company fit: The USP (user selling point) of our product is using AI to design, so our creativity is unlimited. The more products we produce, the better our models are.

• • Freelance designer/ small clothing brand

    • People in this group are different from the two above groups. They not only need unique designs but also want to customize them according to their ideas.

• • • Market: Nowadays, I think there are more and more designers, especially young designers, using technology to create and modify their design, which helps them a lot to save their time. Because the fashion and clothes requirements from people around the world have gone up remarkably, the number of freelance designers and design companies/startups have also increased to meet customers’ demands.

• • • Competitor: Design software companies like Adobe are our competitors in this market. Their financial, ecosystem and engineers are strong enough to catch on. We can beat them by focusing on our blue ocean, personalizing clothes, instead of other design fields.

• • • Company fit: The more designs designers create, the less creativity they have. Because the creativity of an individual has a limit and time for thinking about new products is not short. For this reason, instead of thinking about new concepts, they can use our product to generate some ideas and customize them in several ways to fit their needs.

3. Pricing

Clarifying questions:

• Currently, do we have some way to monetize the product? => No

• How much for the COGS (Cost of goods sold)? => Cannot disclosure

I think instead of providing a specific price number, I will focus on the structure of monetization. After thinking and doing research about potential groups of our customers, we can provide different kinds of price for each group. According to the target markets, we can divided the price structure into 3 categories:

• Price for uniform

• Price for person

• Price for professional designer

Besides the core value of our products, we can offer more add-on features to meet the demands of each group.

• For organization: We can collaborate with other uniform companies to deliver end-to-end products for our customers with a sufficient price. So our customers don’t need to do anything except stay at the office and choose the suitable design before making a final decision. Then other processes would be handled by us and our partners. The price in this option should include the cost for producing clothes based on our design and the delivery ships. By using our product, the customers could save a lot of time and effort by minimizing the complication of the process and contract. The price should be based on the number of products because the retention time is very high in this customer segment.

• For individuals: We should gather more information to make sure we can understand them enough to make a good design. We can also offer the optional features like producing and delivering like the package for organization. But instead of choosing mass-produce companies, we can partner with some startups who are willing to do small batch production. The price should be based on the number of products.

• For designer: We can offer more professional features to help them be able to customize our design in the ways they prefer. Besides monetizing based on the number of products, we can offer them the price packages in month, quarter, and year. Because designers have to design a lot within a period of time so this offer would help them save their cost.

• We can offer our customers a 2-product free trial to make sure they understand how awesome our product is.