Final Presentation

[final slides presented to class including notes; reposted March 30]




Good evening. I'm James. I'm going to be presenting work we've done designing a mini-fridge for your new private label brand.





Meet your target user: college students. When you're in college compact and stylish products are important. You understand this - this was a theme at your stores during back-to-school season this year. But college students are smart and they're attracted to smart products.




Products like laptops. So tell me what are some of things you can do on your laptop?




Yes... Actually, your laptop works with a wide variety of products to form a system.






Visit any college dorm and you'll see that the compact fridge has become a dorm room necessity. But it's really just a dumb box you cram food into.



Visit any college dorm and you'll see that students are trying to extract as much functionality as they can out this box... and they're only moderately successful.




When you go to Best Buy, or any store to buy mini-fridge, it basically comes down to selecting which size box you want.






You see, mini-fridges don't have a lot of features. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily.... but notice that compact fridges don't have any unique features. This is surprising since mini-fridges are use differently than full-size fridges.




There aren't any winners in this market. Everyone is making virtually the same, identical product and competing on price, even the handful of name brands in this market.



Sub-Zero own the high-end refrigerator market. Customers know that Sub-Zero fridges have a unique identity. Customers know that Suz-Zero fridge are made with the finest materials and that they will blend in with their home kitchen.



Nobody owns mini-fridges. The question you need to be asking is how can create a mini-fridge with a unique identity, a student-centered mini-fridge that owns this market.




Well... we've outlined 3 opportunity areas.





The first opportunity is fridge space.

This is Raquib. Raquib has a small kitchen in his dorm room where he prepares many of his meals for himself.



Raquib's biggest challenge is with his fridge: it's a mini-fridge. Raquib tells us it feels "my life revolves around the mini-fridge... I'm constantly going through and reorganizing things."

The point here is simply that it's difficult to organize a mini-fridge.



The majority of college students don't have kitchens in their room like Raquib... but they're still making meals. Like Matt. Matt makes almost all of his meals himself, but doesn't have a kitchen.

















In Matt's words: "my kitchen area is really crappy". Matt's challenge is that his kitchen is incomplete. Everything is spread out and he doesn't even have convenient space to prepare meals.




The point here is that most college students have incomplete and disorganized kitchens, making it extremely difficult to prepare meals.

But students aren't just preparing meals by themselves.




This is Eri. Eri loves to cook. Part of Eri's kitchen is here in her room, including her mini-fridge.




The other part of Er's kitchen is down the hall, where the community kitchen for her floor is. This is a real hassle, because Eri ends up making lots of trips back and forth between her room and the community kitchen to prepare meals.

Eri doesn't just love to cook, she loves to share, too. The students on Eri's floor are always borrowing cooking equipment and food from each other. And on weekends, they all meet in the lounge to eat food someone made and watch a movie together.




What Eri's situations highlights is that when it comes to food, college students are moving around and interacting with each other.



After seeing what college students are really up to, we organized our insights into design criteria. The first opportunity area we outlined was fridge space.



We saw that organization is important. In particular, mini-fridges need easy access and visibility to all parts of the fridge. And they need flexible and dynamic organization features so students can easily reconfigure their fridges to accomodate different items. And of course, it needs to be space efficient.



The second opportunity area, mini-meals, is a much larger area that's richer in problems. Afterall, students don't buy mini-fridges for fridge space, they buy it so they can make meals and snacks.




Looking at mini-meals, we saw that students really need help creating unified kitchen areas in their room.





The last area is sharing. Sharing supports mini-meals, like when Eri's floormates lend each other pots and pans. Sharing is also a reason students by mini-fridges, so they can share food and drink with friends and create sociable rooms.





From sharing, we learned that mini-fridge features should be mobile and support social interaction around preparing and eating food.

Taking this map of design criteria, we some design ideas quickly come to mind...





Things like removable containers...





...stackable storage units...




...and extendable worktops. Taking these ideas, we designed a modular fridge system. It works like this...



Inside the fridge, we have rails that support removable containers, like trays, half-sized trays, shelves and bins which hook onto the rails.



Outside the fridge we also have rails for attaching countertops, bins or hanging your own items. Platforms units stack on top or underneath the fridge.



What this system allows you to do is to create your own kitchen area in your dorm room.



It helps you organize the precious space within the mini-fridge. With the half-trays, now you can easily make room for tall items, like drinks.




You also have a unified, organized kitchen area with work and storage space.



The removable containers allow you to move food around more easily, like trays of pop or cooking ingredients. Having a more complete and open kitchen area makes the room a much more sociable place.



This product is going to be one the first products from a new private label brand you're creating. So why mini-fridges.



Well, in 2004 America spent $75 million on mini-fridges.



And the majority of the users are college students. But this is still only part of the story.



Last year college students spent $10 billion furnishing their dorm rooms and this number is expected to grow. A student-centered mini-fridge is the way to go, for several reason.



We've outlined some ideas on where to go from this design concept.



The first area is barnding. It's crucial to connect with college students and tell the story of how this is more than just a mini-fridge, it's a mini-kitchen. Set different configurations in throughout the store during back to school season. And mix this product in with other products... like putting microwaves, TVs and sandwich makers on the platforms.




But what about after back to shool seasons over. Well, by grouping different features of this system you can easily compete in other markets like apartment and office. In fact, small apartment owners and office workers share many of the same problems that college students have with their fridges.



You may want to extend this concept beyond fridges. Hotplates, microwaves and coffee makers are all extremely popular with college students. You could offer a entire product line of appliances that work together with the mini-fridge system.



And it doesn't just need to be appliances. Taking inspiration from brands like Elfa and Tupperware, you could sell accessories for your mini-fridge, like special containers that fit inside the fridge. In fact, it may be better to partner with some of the brands. It could be as simple as just agreeing on some dimensions so that Tupperware's containers are compatible with your fridge and your fridge is compatible with their containers (everyone benefits).

Either way, college students are spending a lot of money on their dorm rooms and having a lot of problems making meals. Similar problems are experienced in many other environments like small apartments and offices. There's a huge opportunity here. Mini-fridges are a great place to start...