Lean Experimentation

Expanding Gap & Old Navy’s Kids & Baby Business

In Brief

The world’s beloved denim maker, Gap, and their sister brand Old Navy sought to expand their footprint in the Kids & Baby market. Our central digital team was asked, along with several other teams within Gap, Inc. to identify possible solutions to engage parents to spend more with us than our competitors.

We embarked on a 12-week iterative process to innovate in ways the company hadn’t done previously with customer experiences in-store and online.

Team

We defined three levels of collaboration:

  1. The “Core” team - 6 people dedicated 80% of their time to this project. I was on that core team, and most of us were leaders.

  2. The “Working Team” - a collection of roughly 30 partners across merchandising, store leadership, product development, and brand strategy. We conducted ideation sessions and workshops to diverge/converge concepts.

  3. The “Steering Committee” - Executive leadership who we met with bi-weekly to provide updates, gather insights, and align on overall direction.

Overview

Over the span of 12 weeks, we conducted needs finding research by way of in-person interviews in customers homes in both the SF Bay Area and the Denver metro area. We did “shop alongs” with customers in stores, and leveraged journaling and surveys. We learned the needs, behaviors and habits of customers with kids across multiple factors.

We identified 20 concepts, narrowed to 3 eventually and tested immersive experiences in-store with the help of store managers in Emeryville. Sales in our experimental store measured on average +32% over the previous year two days in a row.