You are Mariana Sequeira, head of innovation at Lumière Living, a Porto design house. Your first product for the over-60s, a lamp, worked in testing, and still almost nobody wanted it. Before a euro of the €4.0 million the board has set aside is spent, you have to tell it what exactly was rejected.
The situation
Lumière sells lighting, furniture and household objects across Europe: €38 million of revenue at a 9% operating margin, 160 employees and an in-house studio of 22 designers. Its reputation rests on objects people want to be seen owning, and its buyers are mostly urban 30- to 45-year-olds. The board has ring-fenced €4.0 million to enter the longevity market, and there will be no more.
The first concept was a table lamp with oversized controls and an emergency button, built to a brief you wrote and signed. A panel of 90 people aged 60 to 75 tried it: 71% said it made them feel old, and purchase intent came back at 8%, against the 25% Lumière requires to fund a launch. A 68-year-old woman from Matosinhos turned it over, set it down, said it was beautifully made and added that it would be perfect for her mother.
The serviceable market is worth €90 million a year, but it does not behave as one: between 60 and 70 people buy on self-image; from 75 on, on function and safety, and through assistance channels. You have twelve weeks to a committed go or no-go, an autumn retail slot that will not wait for a second cycle, and a Scandinavian brand preparing its own "dignified ageing" line.
Inside the company nobody reads the result the same way. Engineering sees an incomplete product. The commercial team sees a price nobody has tested. The studio sees an object that says something about its owner that its owner does not accept. The board will measure your plan on four numbers: purchase intent, the product's personal and societal value (20 and 15 out of 100 for the lamp) and a payback period the CFO will not sign above 30 months.