No product-market fit
Philips, understanding how Millennial men’s shaving habits had changed, saw an opportunity to create a new category - a hybrid between Electronics and FMCG – with OneBlade. Avoiding competing directly with larger blade brands, Philips found a unique space for OneBlade - setting it apart by positioning it as a blade that trimmed, edged, and shaved any length of hair.
Philips had invested 3 years and several million euros in a new electric shaver. When the product was about to be launched, Philips clients were not interested as a result of failed concept testing. There was no product-market fit and the team needed to pivot to a new customer segment and prove this new segment would be interested to buy & re-buy replacement blades.
Replacing assumptions with data
We took a team of 6FTE's from Philips out of the building and added a core Innoleaps team consisting of experiment - & business model designers & started the 6-month accelerator program. During the 1st month, we ran hundreds of online experiments to figure out what problem we were trying to solve & for whom. We ran our experiments across multiple target groups and gained crucial consumer insights Philips weren't currently aware of.
In month 3 we had a validated go-to-market strategy targeting a very specific group of customers. We got hooked on running experiments, wanting to have data underpinning everything decision we made. So we ended up testing everything, replacing speculation with data. This is how we decided upon everything, from the name of the product to the pictures used in the Facebook ads. We pivoted the proposition and business model during the accelerator program and identified a new customer segment for Philips to focus on based on the validated learnings and metrics from our experiments.
The biggest success story
The Philips OneBlade was re-launched at the end of 2015 and immediately sold out everywhere. On top of that, the sales of the OneBlade exceeded estimations by over 4 times and generated more than €100mio within the first 18 months. It is currently being sold in more than 33 countries across the world and still, to this day, OneBlade is seen as one of Philips' biggest success stories, growing to be a >€250mio business in just 4 years!
"The Innoleaps accelerator constantly challenged us. We became a true team, lean and eager to fail small and early in order to reach success faster and cheaper. As a result we were not only able to take the product to market with amazing results but also bring back the behaviours of constantly experimenting and innovating into our new standard approach to ensure long and sustainable growth for this awesome product."
Christian Haggerty, Senior Consumer Marketing Manager.