Brabantia revamped its design proposition but what are the strategic concepts for Brabantia to achieve its vision? How should they navigate the future with the such a big portfolio?

Brabantia manufactures items for home like trash bins, laundry bags, and food storage. It has a portfolio of more than 1500 products and enjoys the trustworthy image customers gave them over the years. Brabantia called itself a ‘solid company’ until 2014 when it revamped its design proposition to ‘designed for living’.

To answer the questions posed, we followed the double diamond method, supported by various strategic tools such as ANSOFF, VRIO, SWOT, field mapping etc. so as to build a competitive advantage along with value-centred concepts.

Discover and Define

Internal research showed that the company emphasises on trash bin products more, so other products in the portfolio enjoy less popularity. Using SWOT analysis, we identified strengths, and opportunities for the company. Using VRIO analysis (Valuable, Reliable, Inimitable, Organised) on strengths, we found out that ‘brand trust’ is a strength which could form a competitive advantage.

We used DEPEST/PESTEL (trend) analysis and opportunities from SWOT to build a search field map, which shows various opportunities for the company, suitable to their strengths. These ideas/opportunities were clustered to identify 4 main directions. After plotting the directions on the ANSOFF matrix (with the existing market- new market vs existing product- new product as axis) we found out that ‘products for efficient lifestyle’ is the direction that is suitable for the existing market with a lot of scope for innovation. At the same time, it will make use of the wide portfolio of Brabantia, and brand trust will play a huge role in the easy acceptance of these products.

We decided to follow this direction and build a strategy that makes use of Brabantia’s wide portfolio to decrease the time spent by users on household chores so they can spend their time on more meaningful things.

Develop and deliver

After understanding household chores and pointing out the time-consuming parts of those, we went on a journey to come up with as many ideas as we can. The focus of ideation was to create ideas to decrease the time spent on unimportant tasks. A few of the ideas were selected and combined that were most impactful and contributed most to the decrease in time. We built concepts around these ideas and evaluated them using Datum and Harris profile method. Based on the results, the final concept selected was the development of smart products for the kitchen. Using a storyboard we visualised the kitchen experience and value created.