Caraa
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Caraa is a New York City-based sport bag and accessory company founded in 2015 by CFDA award winning designer Carmen Chen Wu and Aaron Luo to reimagine handbags for modern life. A woman's bag is her ultimate companion and should be thoughtfully designed to fit her needs. Luo and Chen Wu started Caraa because they couldn't find anything in the market that could keep up with their love of exercise and travel, and look good doing so. The founding ethos is simple yet groundbreaking: to create well-made, versatile and smart sports bags that can transition from street to fitness studio, business meeting to dinner, and everywhere in between. The result is the perfect set of hybrid accessories that strike balance between craftsmanship, quality, and sport functionalities. Three years since launching, Caraa has been covered by WWD, SHAPE, Women's Health, Refinery29, Esquire, and many more. Notably, FastCompany dubbed Caraa "the inventor of the athleisure bag" and the company received the 2017 Digiday award for Most Innovative Brand. Caraa is currently stocked in Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Equinox and has been appointed as the exclusive handbag designer for Athleta in 2018, launching first exclusive collaboration of Caraa x Athleta collection in March of 2018. 2017 was our second year in business and a tremendous growth period. Looking back, here are a few highlights of what we accomplished in 2017: • Grew sales by 12x profitably, driving primarily by commerce • Secured over $2+ million in production and manufacturing funding • Reached a 85+ Net Promoter Score across current customer base • Received the 2017 Glossy Emerging Brand of the Year award • Received the 2017 Digiday Most Innovative Brand of the Year Award • Grew our ambassador network tenfold across fashion, fitness, and entertainment worldwide • Signed a multiyear partnership with Athleta as the exclusive brand to lead the overall design and development of their handbags and accessories in 2018 • Launched a capsule collection collaboration with global luxury lifestyle destination Equinox that immediately sold out its first run • Expanded doors with Equinox from 8 to 100% penetration including internationally • Entered Nordstrom ecommerce and brick and mortar stores • Entered the Asia market through over 50+ local influencers in fashion and fitness • Featured by 50+ major news outlets organically including WWD, Vogue, Forbes, Shape, SELF, Refinery29, Coveteur, Esquire, SELF, etc … Fast Company dubbed us the “inventor of the athleisure bag”
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
We reach active women who have an appetite for high-fashion goods yet also have a sense of practicality and don’t want to pay a high premium and mark up for luxury materials. Based on market analysis, we found a significant number of “legging” brands in the activewear space but the options for well made, versatile, and luxurious sports bags were practically nonexistent. We collected data and interviewed 5,000 women across 12 major US metropolitan areas and saw that 86% of employed women aged 22-48 who exercise daily carry separate bags for the studio/gym and office, and nearly 100% are in the market for a singular bag that can be used all day, seamlessly transitioning between work, studio, and social. We source our materials from Milan, Italy and use the same luxury nylon, leather, and hardware as luxury brands like Chanel and Louis Vuitton, while disrupting traditional luxury brand prices with honest MSRP below $850. Our bags have high function design features including tech compartments, hidden air ventilation, and water-repellent and proprietary moisture-wicking materials.
Who worked on the project?
Aaron Luo is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Caraa. Aaron and his Co-Founder, CFDA-Award Winning Fashion Designer Carmen Chen Wu, created Caraa to reinvent the handbag for modern life. In founding and developing Caraa, Luo not only stressed the need for premium handbags accessories that strike the perfect balance between luxury fashion and functionality at honest retail prices, but also redefined and proved a new model for vertically-integrated luxury fashion retail in the digital era, led by revolutionary products vs. solely relying on storytelling. Before Caraa, Aaron founded a sourcing and supply chain agency with offices across New York, Madrid and Shanghai, set to help emerging and scaling fashion brands source and manufacture globally. Aaron has an extensive background in corporate finance and management consulting and is a graduate of University of Massachusetts with a MBA from Case Western Reserve University. Carmen Chen Wu is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Caraa. Carmen is a CFDA award winning fashion designer who designed handbags for some of the top American fashion labels. Carmen studied fashion design at Central St-Martins in London and Parsons School of Design in New York City and cut her professional teeth at American fashion houses such as Ralph Lauren, Alexander Wang, and Marchesa. Born and raised in Spain to a Chinese family, she currently lives in New York which she calls home.
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/152303667
Chapstick® Total Hydration Vitamin Enriched Lip Oil
Company Pfizer Consumer Healthcare
Introduction Date January 1, 2018
Project Website https://www.chapstick.com/products/total-hydration-vitamin-enriched-lip-oil
Why is this project worthy of an award?
DRIVING CATEGORY INNOVATION! ChapStick®, the 135 year old, iconic brand known for its insatiable love of lips, launched into a new category with impact! In 2017, ChapStick introduced Total Hydration Vitamin Enriched Lip Oils, a new vitamin enriched formulation that replenishes moisture for smooth and healthy looking lips. This innovative new line of products created meaningful brand stretch while aligning well to core brand benefits and responding to consumer needs. Leveraging a sophisticated and approachable visual language, Total Hydration Vitamin Enriched Lip Oils embrace ChapStick's brand heritage while still creating breakthrough appeal at shelf. A unique pack structure helped differentiate the new line from core products and created distance from competition.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
ChapStick® Total Hydration Vitamin Enriched Lip Oil replenishes lip moisture with nutrients and oil. It's pack design leverages telegraphic visuals that communicate the key ingredient (vitamin enriched oil) in a clean and contemporary way.
Who worked on the project?
Heidi Short, Senior Designer and Design Manager
View the project video:
Custom-Fit Glasses by Topology Eyewear
Company Topology Eyewear
Introduction Date July 3, 2017
Project Website http://www.TopologyEyewear.com
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Your face is completely unique. And yet, your glasses are anything but. Eyeglasses are mass-manufactured to fit average sizes and average faces, which means they don’t actually fit anyone in particular. That means they can pinch your nose, or pull at your ears, or constantly slide down your face, to say nothing of a trial-and-error shopping process that nobody enjoys. Further, because most fashion companies design spectacles for average-sized caucasian faces, the market excludes a lot of people. Anybody outside the "norm" struggles to find anything that looks good, feels good, and stays on their face. That’s the problem Topology Eyewear founder, Eric Varady, contemplated four years ago, as he walked into his sixth store in a row while shopping for glasses. Since then, our team at Topology has developed a whole new category for the eyewear industry: custom-fit glasses. Using the camera on your iPhone, our machine learning algorithms 3D scan your face to design and build spectacles crafted uniquely for you--all for the same price charged at your local doctor’s office. Along the way, we’ve developed a ground-breaking and easy-to-use app that lets customers design and preview the glasses that they want to wear in 3D, we’ve solved medical measurement problems that enable us to deliver more perfect vision than even what’s available in your doctor’s office. To produce the glasses, we’ve developed an entirely novel, scalable process for manufacturing one-off custom luxury products right here in the Design District of San Francisco. This project is worthy of an award because of the audacity of the challenge undertaken, the amount of innovation required to bring it about, and the implications for the future of manufacturing and of consumer products. The fit of prescription eyewear is a massive problem that touches more than half of the world’s population, and yet the $120 billion industry that should be addressing it hasn’t innovated on anything other than shape, material, and price in generations. In order to realize this vision, Topology needed to push the limits of computer vision, machine learning, and augmented reality, all while designing an entirely new manufacturing paradigm. If we succeed here, we’ll be not only defining the future of eyewear, but the future of personalization of physical products and not just digital experiences. We have a vision for a future in which individuality is not a constraint holding some people back. Today, we are a long-awaited solution for anyone who feels excluded by the eyewear industry, but as we grow, we are re-conceiving the relationship between people and their products. We are challenging the way things have always been done to empower our customers to do the activities they want to do, to wear what they want to wear, and to express themselves however they wish to do so.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
For the last fifteen years, much of the innovation in e-commerce has followed a similar pattern: find something you’d buy offline, and through a combination of removing middlemen, improving logistics, and offering a good service model, making it cheaper and more convenient to purchase that same thing online. But sometimes, price isn’t the main problem with a particular class of products. When you purchase eyeglasses, you're selecting a product that will be front and center on your face all day, every day, for the next two years. It’s an intensely personal, and important item, and it’s an indispensable medical device. What if we brought the weight of modern technology to bear on not just improving price, but to improving the product itself? That’s what Tesla set out to do. That’s what Apple has been doing for 10 years. That’s the level of ambition we want to bring to the eyewear market. For all the innovations that do exist in fashion and beauty e-commerce, the basic concept of how you buy and what you buy remains essentially unchanged: you see something that looks good laid out on a shelf, you try it on yourself to see if you like it or not, and then you decide whether to buy it. Websites offer better looking, larger, and often easier-to-navigate shelves (sometimes the shelf is curated just for you), but the experience at the end of the day is usually the same. A designer has determined what looks good long before meeting you, and you do the work to find out if it can work for you. With Topology, every style can work for you. And be available in every color. The shape of your nose and face are carved right into the frames, because we start each pair from scratch only after we understand what you want. Part of redesigning the product from the ground up has led to a different solution for optical performance as well. Because of the precise measurements we take to build custom frames, we can design your prescription lenses to deliver even better vision than is available from most eye doctors’ offices. One outcome of this is that we are the only company in the world who can sell glasses with progressive lenses (50% of the market—most customers over 45), without a patient ever having to visit a physical store. Finally, this innovation on fit and on personalization has allowed us to crack the code on online returns. While the average return rate for apparel purchased online is 35% (much higher for optical), only 5% of our customers ask for a refund. Mass customization has been a vision shared by product designers and engineers for decades. Topology Eyewear is the first project and company to deliver on that vision for the mass market. We thank you for your consideration.
Who worked on the project?
Eric Varady - Founder/CEO Alexis Gallagher, PhD - Chief Technology Officer Rob Varady - Chief Operating Officer Chris Guest - Chief Marketing & Growth Officer Atul Kanaujia, PhD - Chief Science Officer Viktor Engborg - Lead Product Designer Agnes Vasarhelyi - Senior iOS Developer
View the project video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzoWqKwK4ao
Cuyana
Company Cuyana
Introduction Date March 11, 2018
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
xxx
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
xxx
Who worked on the project?
Karla Shilpa
View the project video:
Dell x Bayou with Love: Recycling Gold from E-Waste to Create Something Beautiful
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Many people do not realize how many precious materials there are in technology -- there is gold, aluminum, carbon fiber, plastics and other materials which can be reclaimed and reused. Unfortunately, only 12.5 percent of global e-waste is recycled, wasting precious materials and destroying our environment in efforts to mine for virgin materials. In America alone, more than $60M in gold and/or silver in phones is thrown out every year. Unlike linear economies, which continuously require natural resources to produce goods, circular economies take goods at the end of their life and recycle them into new products, making them much more environmentally friendly. Recognizing the challenges of e-waste recycling and the human and environmental benefits of circular thinking, Dell took action. Dell partnered with actress, entrepreneur and activist Nikki Reed to launch The Circular Collection by Bayou with Love, a limited-edition jewelry collection sourced from gold recovered from Dell’s e-waste recycling program, which is managed in partnership with Goodwill. In addition, Dell announced an industry-first pilot to use recycled gold from used electronics in new computer motherboards. The closed-loop gold process is expected to support the creation of millions of new motherboards in the next year (for both Dell and other brands), and the pilot expanded Dell’s closed loop program from plastics to precious metals. This gold reclamation process has a 99 percent lower environmental impact than traditionally mined gold and does not impact the quality of the end products. The new Circular Collection and Dell pilot demonstrate the potential for these precious materials to be recycled into goods that are beautiful, valuable and sustainable.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Dell’s unique sustainable designs have been the key to enabling its circular economies in gold. Dell has been able to mitigate the negative impact on the environment by producing recycled products at the same cost. Dell’s deep expertise in supply chain, circular design, and decade plus years building a global electronics recycling infrastructure have been the backbone of this industry leading sustainable innovation. Since 2012, Dell has recycled more than 50 million pounds of post-consumer recycled materials into new products. As part of Dell’s Legacy of Good Program, the company has also pledged to recycle 100 million pounds of recycled content into its product portfolio by 2020. Guiding Dell’s work is the belief that creating a sustainable future requires a real change in mindset around creating value, and it will take new types of innovative designs, collaborations and scalable solutions to get there. By developing circular economies that can serve as scalable models across the industry, Dell continues to use its technology and broad expertise to work where it can do even more good for people and the planet.
Who worked on the project?
Dell and Bayou with Love
View the project video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuGiE5oNOlA
