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Iconic sports brand adidas knew it needed a change when it came to how its global teams collaborate, share knowledge, and ultimately flex their creative juices on the designs and storytelling of the company’s new products hitting the market. And beyond geography, collaboration also must span divisions—from product designers, merchandisers, and marketers to salespeople—making seamless, and accurate, information sharing critical.
Historically, adidas gathered its global team annually for a time-honored tradition familiar to many organizations: the selling season kickoff. Those in attendance were subjected to a deluge of information via a short, rapid-fire lecture and expected to digest all the big ideas for that season, including information about new products, campaigns, and brand initiatives.
Attendees generally left with a lot of questions, such as, “What new products are we trying to sell?” and “What is the overarching story behind that product?” Furthermore, the challenge of disseminating information to a large group placed a time constraint on the whole affair, as following the meeting, staff were required to return to their own teams to relay the information and coordinate a series of complex handoffs.
The Challenge: Crucial Information Missing Its Mark
Despite its common practice, the selling kickoff format proved to be inefficient. While in theory, it’s ideal to gather key stakeholders in a single room for a group discussion, in this case, the reality couldn’t have been more different: too much information, too many voices, too little time.
adidas’ advanced analytics team did a deep dive, finding that their current way of collaborating was not serving them, as it led to siloed decisions resulting in complications such as cost overruns, inefficient workflows, and bottlenecked processes. Key stakeholders often missed out on crucial information and details were lost in translation. This resulted in a full-stop issue: the delivery of inadequate products to wholesale partners. With the existing process seeming beyond repair, they opted to explore an entirely different approach.
The Vision for a Virtual Solution
How does a company go about overhauling its design and storytelling processes? Turning to innovative technologies, such as virtual reality (VR). adidas set out to create a virtual retail space to serve as an immersive testing ground for internal stakeholders, while also providing easy access to assets and information for upcoming product launches.
The company envisioned a single space for collaboration, including a virtual library of product assets. Curated by the design and product teams, these assets could serve marketing and merchandising divisions simultaneously, helping to unify the product narrative. Then, together, all teams could see the culmination of their efforts in a lifelike virtual setting, allowing them to catch flaws before it’s too late. The potential payoff for adidas? Less second- and third-hand information, fewer hand-offs, and less room for error.
Bringing Collaboration to Life
Virtual reality has not only transformed how people consume content and engage in different experiences, it also is transforming the way companies and individuals work, train, and collaborate. The demand for VR from businesses is growing rapidly as they look to engage their employees, partners, and customers in new and more effective ways.
Leveraging VIVE VR systems and The Wild’s immersive collaboration software, adidas set out to create a virtual retail space with assets and information at everyone’s fingertips. This space included high-fidelity visuals that created a true-to-life experience, with accurately portrayed designs and tangible construction elements, as well as a human-scale environment that could be explored on foot.
Now teams could see how their ideas would translate to the real world and explore functionality across a wide range of scenarios. This crucial exploration phase had come much later in the original process and required costly physical mock-ups. By eliminating work silos, these teams radically increased efficiency. Storytelling and product offerings evolved far more quickly, with a much more cost-effective review process. Sales information regarding these new initiatives was disseminated with ease now that teams could explore the ideas together in a live environment.
Lessons Learned
adidas looked at a broken process and decided to reassess from the ground up. It knew what was at stake: If it misses the mark on product storytelling, it misses the mark on the customer experience and, by extension, satisfaction. The new solution streamlines the collaboration process, maximizes resources, and delivers an optimal experience every time.
VR is rapidly revolutionizing how companies conduct business today. Enterprises, like adidas, are using VR to train thousands of people in everything from manufacturing to medical enterprises, and everything in between. Through collaborative VR, adidas achieved its vision of working more collaboratively in a virtual creative space and eliminated the drudgery of the selling season kickoff for good.
Dan O’Brien is head of VIVE Enterprise Solutions at HTC VIVE, a virtual reality (VR) platform built and optimized for premium VR and true-to-life interactions. For more information, visit: www.vive.com.