Testing new ventures for John Lewis

‍

The John Lewis Partnership is the largest employee owned business in the UK, established for over 100 years, their two stores John Lewis & Waitrose are iconic British brands.

But how does a brand like The John Lewis Partnership with all its well established and respected heritage, reinvent itself to keep with the pace of the current retail space? Fast fashion, demanding and unloyal consumers and ever innovative supply infrastructure presents both opportunities and challenges for all retail operations. What’s key is putting the consumer at the heart of the future, and hence John Lewis looked to Future Foundry.

The John Lewis Partnership were looking for the best approach to begin experimentation into new categories, and uncover ways of attracting new customers. Future Foundry were tasked with supporting the innovation function with a proposed new venture, specifically offering additional operational resources around assessing product:market fit for this new initiative.

Future Foundry’s Solution Incubator was the perfect fit for this undertaking, allowing the Future Foundry team to come on board quickly, define the problem John Lewis were best placed to solve, and therefore, identify areas within the proposed venture which required iteration in order to best service their key identified market.

The clear scope of the Solution Incubator meant Future Foundry were able to deliver a bespoke package within a fixed time, defined remit and at a competitive cost. All this, without compromising on the delivery of rich, data driven insight, centred on genuine consumer testing and feedback to inform required direction changes for the venture. All in 12 weeks.

“The Solution Incubator is particularly excellent when you've got a strong sense of the customer problem that you are trying to solve, but you need a fresh perspective on how best you need to really dig into that problem to find the best solution for your customers.” - Tiffany Bain, John Lewis