Money works differently in communities traditionally excluded from formal banking, which makes designing products that really serve their needs a very different kind of challenge. People who live in the last mile often prefer cash because it’s physical. They can see it, touch it, and access it at any time.

While digital money offers many benefits, such as securely sending money over long distances and accessing new forms of credit, many don’t trust it because the places where they can access digital currency have often been too far away.

In 2017, over 500 million adults lived more than three miles from a financial access point in eight emerging markets studied by the Gates Foundation. This may not sound like much of a barrier, but for those living in the last mile, it means having to close their shops, lose a day of earnings, arrange family care, and pay for travel, which can be time-consuming and difficult, especially during rainy seasons. For low-income people, the inaccessibility of financial services has been a deal-breaker for adopting digital money. On the flip side, banks, telecoms, and other companies struggled to reach these customers because their products were not inclusively designed for them, and their distribution models failed to scale in rural areas.

Amid these myriad challenges, IDEO and the Gates Foundation saw an opportunity to introduce innovative ways to provide access to digital financial services even in the most remote areas of the world. And to make bold new bets: Could we design new digital experiences centered around the financial needs of people in the last mile? What would happen if we mobilized hundreds of actors to develop new ways to address financial access at the last mile? What if we took the most exciting financial innovations that worked in East Africa and piloted them in South Asia—and vice versa?

Working with more than 70 partners, including local startups, corporations, including Google, Unilever, Telenor, Standard Chartered, and BNI, as well as IDEO.org’s Women & Money program, LMM adopted a collaborative, ecosystem approach to drive and scale new digital financial products and systems.

A few of the life-changing innovations launched by LMM and its partners include:

• Finja’s intuitive small-business app that helps micro-merchants in Pakistan access flexible, interest-avoiding Islamic credit  to order products from fast-moving consumer goods companies like Unilever. Finja now serves 45,000 merchants and reaches 10.2 million customers.
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• Accessing government benefits can be a challenge, especially when it’s through a mobile phone, so IDEO helped Indian startup Haqdarshak develop a robust digital experience for its 52,000 community agents to facilitate access for low-income people. The agent network—70 percent of whom are women—now serves more than 7.6 million families and has unlocked $2.2 billion in social benefits for those who need it most.
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• Making micro-credit nearly instantaneous was a solution that startup Kuunda offered to financial agents in Tanzania. IDEO helped adapt the product to deliver working capital for merchants in Pakistan. Today, Kuunda continues to grow across markets in Africa, totaling 6.1 million active users and distributing $1.1 billion in loans globally.   

While the LMM program officially concluded in 2024, lessons, tools, and case studies from the program are accessible on IDEO’s Financial Futures website. Those looking to catalyze equity and inclusion in digital financial services for the last mile can consult LMM’s Financial Confidence Playbook, the open-source Digital Confidence Toolkit (created in collaboration with Google), or the Gender Evaluation Framework, among other helpful resources.

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Over 1.3 billion people worldwide in poor and rural areas are excluded from formal financial services, including savings accounts, credit lines, and insurance, making it harder for them to move out of poverty.

34M

underserved users reached by 100+ new financial products, pilots, and prototypes

70+ LMM partners

including Google, Unilever, Grab, Standard Chartered, Cargill, Airtel, Celo Foundation, and BNI

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Multinational CPGs excel at creating popular, mass-market products for large countries. When they enter smaller countries like Peru, they often parachute their brands onto store shelves and skip consumer product testing altogether, largely relying on brand recognition to drive sales. This oversight presented Alicorp and IDEO with an opportunity: flip the script and invite young Peruvian women to work together with them to create a new hair care brand from scratch. Over the course of a four-year transformational journey, IDEO worked closely with Alicorp, adopting a “learn by doing” approach to foster a culture of innovation, launch a new brand, and drive growth for the company through consumer-centric design.

The collaboration began with an inspirational trip 10,000 miles away to Seoul, South Korea, the epicenter of global beauty trends. To expand their thinking, the Alicorp/IDEO team received K-Pop glow-ups and explored other cutting-edge beauty experiences. They were inspired by the Korean market’s unwavering focus on meeting the particular hair care and skin needs of Korean women.

Back in Peru, the team conducted multiple rounds of in-depth interviews with young women, teenagers, beauty influencers, and experts across the country. They learned about their beauty goals, personal care routines, and “mixto” hair texture. They heard about women’s struggles with regional weather—the Andean region’s extreme dryness versus Lima’s humidity and the city’s hard water. The research revealed that Peruvian women wanted natural products that worked hard, wouldn’t harm their hair, and celebrated what made them unique. They wanted a brand that spoke to them honestly and authentically. That represented and empowered them. That didn’t overpromise, underdeliver, or hold up European and American beauty ideals that didn't resonate with Latin American women like the multinationals did.

Armed with these insights, the Alicorp/IDEO team developed tangible brand prototypes for women to respond to during successive rounds of user research, including in a beauty pop-up store in Lima. The team shared various bottle types, ingredient mixtures, and brand positioning options. Should the new brand’s personality be an outspoken feminist or a gal pal? Au naturel or sophisticated? The iterative feedback cycles informed everything from brand strategy and ingredient recommendations to product line-up, brand and product naming, launch strategy, and digital activations.

The final design, Amarás (“you will love”), is a personal care line that centers the needs and aspirations of Peruvian women. Hitting shelves in 2022, its shampoos and conditioners feature local, bio-diverse ingredients, including mangoes, macadamia nuts, and goldenberries, that help address the specific hair texture needs of women in LATAM and the climate realities of the Andean region. The brand’s launch campaign included TV and print ads featuring Peruvian models from every region as well as commissioned murals celebrating local beauty by artists across Peru. Most notably, the unapologetically authentic Peruvian hair care brand became a TikTok sensation, garnering over seven million organic views and more than 300 viral videos from enthusiastic new fans.

Three months after its launch, Amarás seized a 7.5 percent share of the personal care aisle—a remarkable goal it had set for year three.Since then, Alicorp has continued to expand its creative capabilities, designing personal care products tailored to the cultural and beauty needs of Latin American consumers.

Alicorp launched numerous successful brand extensions across its food and home care categories, but was unable to crack the $340M USD hair care product market in its home country of Peru.

7.5%

Amarás’ share of the Peruvian hair care market 3 months after launch—a goal Alicorp had set for year 3

7M+ organic views and 300+ organic fan videos

created on TikTok during Amarás’  launch campaign

Thirty years ago, China-based Jack Technology started as a home sewing machine manufacturer. A decade ago, the innovative global leader began investing in robotics and exploring AI, a decision that positioned it well to address today’s urgent need for smarter manufacturing solutions.

Believing that a new, strategically positioned sub-brand could draw in larger, more premium global manufacturing customers, Jack Technology and IDEO set out to understand their needs. IDEO began by visiting more than a dozen garment factories across China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, conducting in-depth interviews with factory managers, industrial engineers, pattern-making leaders, and frontline workers. It soon became clear: the apparel manufacturing industry is at a critical juncture. The way apparel manufacturers navigate the promises of intelligent technology—while addressing deep-rooted structural issues like labor shortages and working conditions—will shape the industry's development for years to come.

For premium clothing brands, garment factory compliance and worker well-being are priorities when selecting production partners, so many owners proudly showcased their improvement efforts. They discussed investing in quieter machines and air conditioning, enhancing lighting, adding greenery, and implementing no-overtime policies. Amid rows of identical sewing stations, the IDEO team noticed small human gestures, such as a small vase of flowers. As one operator said, “I just want to uplift myself during work.”

The research helped IDEO identify a core opportunity for differentiation. Create human-centered products and services that further enhance working conditions in large apparel factories, strengthen their ability to attract and retain talent, and drive the industry toward a more sustainable future. Through multiple rounds of co-creation with the Jack Technology team and key apparel-sector stakeholders, a clear brand direction for Aitu began to take shape: “Smart Machines, Uplifting People.”

Guided by this human-centered ethos, IDEO helped build a comprehensive brand system for Aitu. The idea of “uplifting people” and showcasing garment workers’ professionalism and skill is expressed throughout all brand communications, the industrial design of its smart sewing machines, and the interaction and industrial design of a humanoid sewing robot.

In the eyes of factory workers, this is the new work experience Aitu brings to life. Compared with traditional bulky industrial machinery, the clean lines and soft edges of Aitu’s new AI-powered sewing machines feel more like the professional office tools found in bright, organized workplaces. Concave surfaces and soft materials diffuse glare from overhead lighting, reducing eye strain, while clear interaction logic and icon-based visuals accommodate operators with varying levels of skill and education. AI technology, seamlessly embedded in the machine’s core functions, automatically adjusts parameters for different fabrics and tasks, allowing operators to achieve high-precision results with less effort. A soft halo-like light glows whenever the AI-assisted function is active, fostering users’ trust in both the technology and the AI-powered sewing machine as a whole. When hundreds or thousands of Aitu machines are arranged together in a factory, the overall effect is a modern, professional, and high-end work environment.

Working closely with Aitu’s robotics team, IDEO’s final design challenge was to bring a human-machine collaboration to life through a full-scale AI robot, AI10. The robot has an elegant, biomimetic silhouette. Its fabric-like outer finish features design elements commonly found in garment making, such as cutting and stitching lines, giving the robot the approachable look and the feel of a skilled tailor companion who can assist with simple, repetitive tasks. When AI10 is in operation, a circular light ring gently pulses at the sides of the robot’s ears as well as on the paired sewing machine’s display screen, clearly signaling the robot’s activity to its human co-workers.

In September 2025, Jack Technology debuted its new Aitu brand, along with its first AI sewing machine and a humanoid robot prototype, at a launch event at Shanghai Tower and at the China International Sewing Machine & Accessories Show. IFA Berlin, Europe’s largest trade show for consumer electronics, honored Aitu with a Gold Award for AI Product Innovation for seamlessly integrating AI technology and industrial design. Jack Technology’s humanoid robot is expected to go into full-scale production in 2026.

Before AI, the apparel manufacturing industry had experienced little fundamental change since the invention of the lockstitch sewing machine nearly two centuries ago.

2025 Gold Award for AI Product Innovation

from IFA, the world’s largest home and consumer tech event

Alicorp has direct operations in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile, manages export operations in more than 30 countries, and oversees over 150 brands. While its AlaCena sauces are ubiquitous in South America, the brand’s North American market primarily consisted of purchases made via Amazon by Peruvians living abroad. To help the CPG giant expand meaningfully and sustainably onto US grocery shelves—and achieve its ambitious $50 million retail sales goal in five years—Alicorp and IDEO collaborated on multiple projects over a two-year period. The partnership began in early 2020 with consumer research and product strategy, ultimately leading to the development of initial product branding, positioning for launch, and an in-market pilot in late 2021.

‍‍Through a combination of large-scale digital surveys and in-depth, in-person and remote research interviews, IDEO discovered that AlaCena’s Tari and Uchucuta’s hot sauce recipes resonated the most with US consumers. Made from native Aji Amarillo and Rocoto chili peppers ground using a traditional Andean “batán” technique, consumers appreciated their complex flavors and enjoyed how they enhanced, not overpowered, everyday foods like burgers and fries. The sauces’ authentic Peruvian culinary roots were also a key differentiator. In addition to consumers, IDEO consulted with industry experts—including executives from large-scale grocery chains and chief merchants of leading big-box stores—to explore retail and marketing trends and identify potential innovation partners for Alicorp in the US.

Based on the research, IDEO recommended a few changes to ensure a successful launch: Lead with the Tari brand, which was the most memorable and easiest to pronounce, and position it as an “everything sauce.” Change the packaging from a large plastic pouch to a smaller squeeze bottle to better align with consumers’ expectations and stand out on the inside of refrigerator doors. Adjust the product formulation to appeal to mainstream consumers looking for cleaner labels. And visually celebrate Tari’s Peruvian roots through bright colors, traditional textiles, and a llama, an animal closely associated with the Andes Mountains. In addition to these recommendations, IDEO provided a comprehensive go-to-market retail strategy that included potential US regions for launch, retail brokers, distributors, manufacturers, and R&D and pilot retail lab partners, as well as job descriptions for a new North American-based sales team.

While Alicorp worked on reformulation and packaging strategies, IDEO refined Tari’s initial branding strategy. Steeped in Peruvian aesthetics, the brand’s new look and feel featured a vibrant color palette, geometric patterns, and—of course—a friendly llama icon, which could also be found on all in-store point-of-sale items IDEO designed for Tari's pilot launch in late 2021.

The successful 12-week in-market pilot in Tom Thumb grocery stores gave Alicorp the confidence to have its in-house design team make the brand even bolder and more eye catching, and to launch two flavors, Amarillo Pepper and Rocoto Pepper, on Amazon and in over 50 retail stores in late 2024.

Since then, the popular sauces consistently rank among the top 50 percent of the fastest-selling products on US shelves, with 80 percent of sales revenue representing new business. In 2025, Tari expanded its offerings with three additional flavors: Zesty Verde, Tropical Kick, and Smoky Heat. Today, Tari is in transit to 3,000 major grocery stores, including Wegmans, Meijer, Central Market, and The Fresh Market, as well as available for purchase on Amazon.

Alicorp had a vision to expand its beloved and delicious hot sauces to the US market, but needed help fine-tuning the brand and product for an American audience.

3,000

major US grocers, including Wegmans and Meijer, have signed on to sell Tari hot sauces

80%

of Tari’s sales revenue represents new business, a significant expansion of the overall category

Ranked in the top 50%

of the fastest-selling products on US grocery shelves

While those can be useful tools, the true beauty and power of workshops is in being pushed out of your comfort zone: a group of adults struggling to share opinions openly, dive into group activities, and ultimately enjoy the mindset change that comes through participation.

Since the pandemic began, we’ve been forced to bring workshops online—and fundamentally rethink the way we conduct them. Hosting online workshops is not about bringing what we used to do in the physical space to the online world: it’s something new, and we should create completely new tools to adapt to the online world.

Over the past several months I’ve started to prototype new tools for remote workshops. They’re still experiments rather than tools, but that’s okay: designing workshop tools is the same as designing anything else—it’s about prototyping quickly, and iterating for improvement over and over again. Here are four insights we’ve gained in the process.

1. Let the unexpected overflow from the screen

Creating an atmosphere that is strange, weird, and slightly unusual is key to achieving impact through workshops: it gets people out of their comfort zones and opens their minds to new ways of doing business. In the digital realm, most participants will be calling in from home (i.e., their #1 comfort zone), and you need to intentionally haul them out of their day-to-day.

Virtual backgrounds are an easy win: they can create visual interest and curiosity while also functioning as a tool for individual expression. One great ice breaker is to start by asking participants to create their own virtual backgrounds in teams, using Google Slides.

Throwing in a custom-made Snap Camera filter is also a great idea, because it offers participants a chance to hide a part of their face if they feel uncomfortable with experimentation. Instead, they can addd something new like donkey heads or puppy ears. As a facilitator, these tools allow you to get in on the fun with participants. It allows the group to feel that you are on the same team as you explore new territory together, rather than a facilitator insisting they do something uncomfortable.

2. Pick up non-verbal cues from participants

In a physical workshop, one of the key roles of the facilitator is to “read the room.” This is one of the hardest things to do online—all you can see is a participant’s torso with facial expressions, which may not be truly reflecting their emotions. Another way of looking at this, though, is that the online environment can create psychological safety, allowing for more open and honest communication.

To capitalize on this, I created a tool called the Mood Checker, which allows participants to rate their mood on a scale of 1-5, anonymously and in real time. Their responses are constantly aggregated on the facilitator view, allowing the facilitator to always keep track of how the participants are feeling. Initially I wanted the participants to use the slider throughout the day at any time, but after a few trials, we quickly learned that we should designate a few moments in the workshop where we ask the participants to reflect their thoughts on the Mood Checker.

A tool like Mood Checkers lets the facilitator read the digital room. Think about other ways you can utilize the anonymity of the online space to get honest, real-time feedback from your participants and to make your workshop the best it can be.

3. Incorporate physicality

One of the things that I watch out for most during online workshops is making time for everyone to move their bodies. Getting up and moving away from the computer makes everyone feel much more connected and has a positive effect on their wellbeing. Since I tend to do a design-themed workshop, it also helps us remember that good design can not be achieved without the notion of physicality.

An easy way to achieve this is to have the participants go for a walk, either by themselves or by staying in the call through their phones. We can leverage the fact that they are dialing in from different locations: with the phone’s camera, we can have the participants hunt for creative inspiration in their neighborhood. For example: “Take 3 pictures of new behaviors you see in the neighborhood,” or “Find and share your favorite typography that you can see from where you are.”

I also created a Remote High Five system, which, as you may have guessed, tracks the participants’ hand positions through the computer’s camera and plays clap sounds when your onscreen hand “high fives” someone else’s. While this was initially made as a fun experiment, it became an end-of-workshop ritual thanks to its physicality and joyfulness. It quickly became one of the iconic moments of the workshop.

4. There are always ways to realize ideas. Just start small.

Some of these examples may seem too wild or unfeasible depending on your technical know-how. But the important point here is to start small, prototyping ideas quickly and with the least risk. It doesn't have to be perfect on the first go; in fact, it will never be perfect on the first go. Just remember that there are always ways to make an idea happen: give it a shot, and iterate with small tests to improve your idea. It’s actually much easier to try out new ideas online because there’s really nothing to shy away from when, at the end of the day, all you’re facing is a computer screen.

Ultimately, the goal of a good workshop is to get participants to step out of their comfort zones and adopt a new mindset. It’s a shame that many people underestimate the creative potential of workshops and often opt for a generic format: when you tackle a workshop just like you would tackle any other design challenge, the outcomes can be quite transformative and magical.

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Workshops are everywhere, from training programs at big corporations to urban planning sessions at local town halls. Given how formulaic many workshops have become, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re all about colorful Post-its and saying “yes, and...”

They were in search of a feature that would excite Card Members, especially millennials coming of age financially. Everything was in place, but their project whiteboard had one last empty box.

The IDEO and American Express teams paired up for a design sprint, and in the first few weeks of research, after extensive qualitative interviews, an idea emerged: a new, transparent and easy-to-use way to split large purchases into equal monthly payments, with a fixed fee and no interest. The feature, called Pay It Plan It, launched in the market in 2017. Since then, it has been used to create five million payment plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in lending. It represents a notable, widespread behavior change. Card Members are spending differently, by design.

But getting here took more than just a bright idea. At a large organization like American Express, in a complicated and highly regulated industry, and in a smartphone-first environment, transforming an insight about consumer behavior into a beloved tool for Card Members required a particular flavor of corporate agility. At the time, there was nothing like Pay It Plan It—at American Express, or elsewhere. Bringing it to Card Members would require a substantial technical and financial investment, affecting everything from payment terms to the way the smartphone app handled swipes. All of that was doable, but leaders still had to do it—they had to make the heavy lift to usher a concept sketch into becoming a meaningful part of customers’ lives. The success of Pay It Plan It as a feature driven by emotional insights—while driving the bottom line—has made it a beacon inside American Express. For many, it marked a new way of working within the company, a transformational shift in the way ideas are conceived and implemented.

The following story recounts the development of Pay It Plan It, told through the voices of the IDEO and American Express team members who worked on it.

1. Plus, and...

In 2015, Amex was looking for something new to engage consumers—particularly younger professionals who wanted to avoid the pitfalls of credit card debt. Innovation within the consumer lending space had traditionally been all about rewards and cash back perks, but Amex was committed to finding something different that empowered their Card Members. Was there something else? And if so, what?

Kyoko King is currently VP, Global Commercial Services at American Express; at the time of Pay It Plan It, she worked on consumer products, focused on new product innovation.
“It felt like a race to the bottom. We kept throwing more rewards at the customer, so they win out, but there's no actual edge. That was the challenge we set out to solve.”

Leigh Cohen is a Design Lead at IDEO, and a team member on the original design sprint.
“I remember we wrote on the white board, plus, and, next to an empty box. The reward structure of this new card was already defined—but then what? What goes in the box? What is this thing? It can be very daunting to come up with something that not only makes sense to Card Members, but also makes sense to American Express, and is also a smart way to help people spend appropriately and confidently.”

Jenny Shum is currently VP, Head of US Small & Mid Market B2B Marketing at American Express; at the time of Pay It Plan It, she was VP of Consumer Lending Products.
“We had aspirations to reinvent what a credit card could be, and the role it plays in a consumer’s life. But this is a very regulated industry, and we were afraid that we would come up with a brilliant idea we couldn’t deliver. And yet we didn’t want to be constrained by that.”

2. An emotional insight

Over a series of consumer interviews conducted across the country, the team honed in on a key set of desires: credit card users wanted more flexibility and transparency in how they paid for big purchases, and they wanted to feel like they had autonomy in how they pay for the things they buy.

Kyoko King, Amex: “We had done the side-by-side comparison of Amex versus other cards, we had done task forces looking at debit versus credit. We always had the knowledge that customers don't like our credit cards, but I don't think we ever went so far as to say, ‘They just emotionally don't like it.’ I remember IDEO saying to us, ‘It makes them feel bad. You guys make them feel bad. Customers have no control, no transparency.’ But here IDEO just said, ‘It's an emotional problem, therefore, the solution has to be emotional.’”

Travis Lee is Managing Director and Partner at IDEO, and guided the initial sprint.
“American Express is a service company. They think of themselves as trying to serve their customers as human beings—and the card is a means through which they provide service. It’s not their product. And that’s very different from a lot of companies. So what if we can think of lending as a service?”

Kyoko King, Amex: “Our team at Amex was all about growing lending—lending, lending, lending. That was even what it said on my business card. And then IDEO came in and said, ‘Well, it's all about paying. No one is thinking that Amex is lending them money. It's all about when they can pay.’”

3. We could really break things!

As clear as it was that credit card users wanted more flexibility and control—not just more rewards and perks—so too was the realization that the Amex/IDEO team had let the genie out of the bottle: implementing this wouldn’t be easy. This wasn’t just another lending feature, but would require a fundamental rethinking of how Card Members paid their bills.

Dory Butler is VP, Digital Product Management; she led the digital team that implemented Pay It Plan It.
“People were nervous. We could really break things! It involved significant changes to our payment hierarchy, our accounts receivable systems, how we calculated what customers owed to us, and so on.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: “We were certainly aware of the potential this product could have—and we’d sized the financial benefits—but what was different here was the process of understanding true customer needs.”

Kyoko King, Amex: “You know when you sign a car lease or a mortgage, and there’s a stack of papers that you have to sign with ten different signatures, every couple pages? That's what we were trying to put onto our credit card. I remember our compliance person sitting me down and saying, ‘You're trying to put a closed loan into an open credit product.’ That was the first time I realized we were creating something so complicated—even if to a consumer it made complete sense and felt so simple.”

Dory Butler, Amex: “As a company, we've identified opportunities and gone after them in the past. But many times those opportunities are highly driven by business outcomes, and not as highly driven by customer outcomes. Pay It Plan It was all because of a customer need, but we could see that the business benefit of that would flow and follow.”

Kyoko King, Amex: “After that initial sprint it was kind of a no-brainer. If we could do this, we should do this. But it was very clear that we should do it only if the experience stays as simple as what we’re proposing. If it becomes a series of terms and conditions and things you have to click and fill out, then we’ll lose the essence of what it is we're delivering.”

4. Buy-in for the buy-in

Given the complexity of the implementation—and the simplicity of the desired result—the Amex/IDEO team planned an unusual internal communications strategy, rooted in the emotional insight at the heart of Pay It Plan It.

Leigh Cohen, IDEO: “Executives across American Express had to understand the value this product was going to bring—the emotional value to Card Members, and the financial value to its business. We wanted them to see the overlap between the financial confidence Pay It Plan It could bring, and their brand values of trust and security. And they had to see how it was delivering upon their internal objective as an organization to be thinking about smart lending, and what lending looks like for their current members.”

Kyoko King, Amex: “We couldn't pitch this in a PowerPoint deck. We had to translate that consumer insight to the pricing team, the technology team; we had to change minimum due, payment hierarchy, grace—three different components that are extremely difficult to touch. It was like a house of cards: everything could fall down. Usually if you touch any one of them, all those teams are like, ‘No, no, no, it's not worth it!’ It just wasn't something you could understand in a really rational format; there was so much emotion to it, there was a customer need we were solving for. Usually we had bullet points and boxes with words, and a P&L or business case that’s about the numbers. But here we began with sketches and drawings of what this could look like. That was very different than how we operated before. It was new. And it incited interest.”

Kelly Bjork is a Senior Design Director at IDEO; she helped lead the team that designed and implemented Pay It Plan It.
“These are rational people! You were talking to C-suite level folks who have their bill on AutoPay. They don't think about these things. So our work was putting them in the shoes, if you will, of the Card Member who this was targeted for. It's kind of that simple.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: “The magic of Pay It Plan It is that it gives consumers the confidence that they have a lending solution if they need it. I don’t think we necessarily went in with this intention, but that directly aligned to Amex’s brand heritage, of giving consumers control. The brand team saw how exciting this was, even before the business unit decided to invest in making it real.”

Dory Butler, Amex: “You have to continuously sell-in these ideas internally to have the level of investment that you need to do them right.”

Travis Lee, IDEO: “Innovation at this scale can't happen purely grassroots. You can't just get a single team leader excited about it, and expect it to happen. You have to get everyone’s buy-in, you have to get everyone’s excitement, you have to make sure they understand why it matters to do it, even if it's gonna be hard. And you also have to get the CMO pumped. All of these people have to greenlight it in their own way.”

5. How it spurred organizational change

In 2017, Pay It Plan It launched under a strategy nicknamed “Big Bang,” rolling out to 21 million customers in 30 days. As of August 2020, it is available to almost all US consumer Card Members, who have collectively created nearly five million Plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in purchases, with an average Plan size of $789. But as much as they have embraced Pay It Plan It, so too did Amex executives. The unique story of its implementation became company lore: here was an emotional insight that unlocked significant business outcomes.

Kyoko King, Amex: “The internal teams could see it: this was reflective of all the data and information we have seen and heard for years and years. But this is a new way to approach the problem! I often talk about it in terms of learning a new language. Amex internally thinks of itself as a rational company based on CBAs and models. The breakthrough—and the thing I'm most proud of—was bringing that customer emotion into internal decision-making, seeing Amex become emotional rather than purely rational.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: “Kyoko and I joke that we feel like we walked through a doorway to an alternate universe that we can’t turn back from. This is a long-term strategic investment that would have been hard to write the business case for—but that was also the exciting part, because it is transforming a business, versus delivering an incremental product. The challenge now is whether we will be able to galvanize the organization in a similar way, towards solutions for our customers.”

Leigh Cohen, IDEO: “The pieces came together in this perfect storm: the Amex leadership focusing our IDEO team on the opportunities that were strategic within their organization; our team's ability to unpack and uncover an emotional resonance with the Card Member, that really spoke to them wanting to be a more confident spender on credit; and then the internal buy-in and belief that this not only resonated internally, but also could convert externally.“

Kyoko King, Amex: “To be honest, this began as an eight-week engagement of just asking, ‘Okay, let's see what you guys can think of: a slap-on feature to our credit card.’ So for it to then result in something that was implemented across all of our cards—that is a big, big deal.”

Kelly Bjork, IDEO: “Getting something like this to market feels like sort of a small miracle to me.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: What has followed me from this project is really understanding the emotion of the customer—not just the words they tell us, but what worries them and why.

Illustrations by FagoStudio.

In 2015, American Express (Amex) came to IDEO for help putting the finishing touches on a new consumer credit card. Its reward structure was fixed—but what else might it be?

They worried about how they’d feed themselves or their families. Or felt the physical and emotional stresses of want and hunger. Of that number, 11 million were children.

Today, the picture has worsened. This year, a year in which American lives have been ravaged by disease or economic crisis or both, more than 50 million people will have faced the reality of food insecurity; almost half of them will have sought help from food banks and other sources of support.

This pandemic of hunger continues to unfold, year-on-year, across the United States—one of the richest nations on earth.

It is a crisis that moves inexorably forward, but also one that’s rooted in inequities stretching back into our collective history. Our food system, like many of our society’s most foundational systems, is racist by design. The labor of Black and Indigenous workers and people of color (BIPOC) forms the backbone of the industry’s essential workforce—specifically women of color. They serve or cook in restaurants; they perform dangerous, exhausting work in food plants; they labor on farms; and they bring deliveries to others’ homes and apartments. And they have been disproportionately impacted by the knock-on effects of the pandemic, including decreased food security. Additionally, racism—in the form of food systems that are effectively separate from and unequal to those afforded to white communities—has historically denied BIPOC access to preventative nutrition. The result? Disproportionate incidence of chronic health conditions and weakened immune systems, both of which are now further intensifying the devastating impact of COVID.

It is a story of injustice and inaction. And it demands we step up and help create change.

How might food leaders work to dismantle the systemic inequity in our industry and in the communities we operate? And how might we improve the lives of those most unjustly affected? We see three paths where design can drive efforts towards solutions.

Prioritize food workers’ livelihoods

The most straightforward way to reduce food insecurity among food workers? Pay them more money.

The food industry employs roughly 14 percent of the U.S. workforce, with the lowest median wage of any industry. In many states, it’s legal to offer restaurant workers a sub-minimum wage of less than $5 an hour—sometimes as low as $2.13. Black servers are typically not tipped as well as their white coworkers: A recent study revealed that for tipped restaurant workers in New York, white men made almost an $8 an hour more than black women.

Food manufacturers, quick-service restaurants (QSRs), and retailers are largely responsible for producing, serving, and distributing food; but the cruel irony is that their own employees—along with those growing and harvesting the food that they sell—are often food insecure and hungry. One out of six restaurant workers live below the poverty line.

Following the example of brands like Shake Shack and In-n-Out Burger, others must rethink their business models to offer their workers more than the minimum wage. Similarly, they can design competitive benefits, as Starbucks does, offering healthcare and tuition reimbursement to full- and part-time employees.

Improve the quality of mass-produced food

Many low-cost foods are intentionally designed to be sold in mass quantities to people who can’t afford higher quality items. This perpetuates a supply chain that values long shelf-life and cost-efficiency over nutrition. A complete overhaul of existing product formulations is required to maintain the convenience and comfort that people seek, but eliminate ingredients proven to contribute to higher rates of heart disease and diabetes, such as high-fructose corn syrup or processed or refined carbohydrates.

A June 2020 study revealed that as households stock up on shelf-stable foods, they appear to purchase products with less nutrient-dense ingredients—often ultra-processed, calorie-dense comfort foods. This is setting the stage for an increase in childhood obesity, particularly for economically vulnerable families.

Convenient and nourishing comfort foods are rare. Designing them and putting them on shelves across the nation is an excellent challenge for the food industry’s formidable R&D capabilities.

There are examples to be inspired by, however. Pierre Thiam, a celebrated Senegalese chef and leading authority on African foods, founded Yolélé Foods to bring fonio, a West African grain, to a global audience. Fonio is a versatile ingredient with a nutty flavor; it’s included in the Future 50 Foods List, an effort from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Knorr to highlight foods that support human and environmental health. One of Thiam’s vehicles for fonio is pilaf, and Yolélé Foods’ affordable, microwavable bags of seasoned pilaf are sold online and at brick-and-mortar stores nationally. This product innovation unites what is not only feasible, viable, and desirable; but also more sustainable and nutritious.

If it works for fonio, why not for brown rice? It’s one of the most familiar, nutritious, and affordable food staples in the United States, yet few have attempted to make it desirable and easy to cook. It’s an enormous opportunity. And design is a way to reconceive brown rice into products that are as simple and convenient as the more ubiquitous ramen and macaroni and cheese filling pantries nationwide.

Give more people access to nutritious food

That separate and unequal food system? Karen Washington, a food justice activist, calls it food apartheid. And the evidence to support that frame is all around us. Poorer neighborhoods have fewer grocery stores with nutritious food options; fast food chains dominate instead. There is a need for quick service restaurants (QSRs), retailers, food banks, and federal food assistance programs (SNAP)—all players that influence food access—to design new ways for healthy food to be available to everyone.

Free food is a critical support for hungry people. But there is a stigma attached to accepting it, and it can be a deeply demoralizing experience to stand in long lines and receive a bag of food you don’t like or can’t eat. During COVID-19, we’ve witnessed heroic efforts by food banks and pantries to increase their services. Food banks originally created drive-thrus to overcome the stigma of free food, but now, even more have added this feature to facilitate contactless service.

Northern Illinois Food Bank (NIFB) partnered with IDEO to improve their My Pantry Express program, a digital food pantry service that refers to their customers as “neighbors.” The program offers their neighbors a choice of what food they receive. Typically, food banks determine their success based on pounds of food or “meals” distributed, but NIFB wanted to use more human-centered metrics to determine if their service offers food that people actually want and will eat. The team discovered that offering choice in food selection, even in a limited way, created higher neighbor satisfaction and more referrals—94 percent said they would recommend the program to a friend. We can use design to identify what people value most, then use these findings to improve services, meet more people’s needs, and in this instance, get more nutritious food into more hands and homes.

Learn more about IDEO's partnership with NIFB.

Looking ahead

Given the number of cracks the pandemic has revealed in many of our national and global systems, it can be hard to know where to begin reimagining better solutions. But food is fundamental—and improving the food system is achievable. As we look to the coming year and the post-pandemic recovery period, let’s ask ourselves:

• How might we ensure that the people producing and serving our food have equal access to food for themselves and their families?
• How might we rethink our success metrics to be more human-centered?
• How might we create products and services that are not only profitable, but nutritious and sustainable?
• How might we put our R&D efforts towards creating beloved food products that are convenient and nourishing?
• As a leader in the food industry, how might we look first to the ways we can support our own employees before directing community support efforts beyond our organization?

By prioritizing people’s needs and developing human-centered innovations for business, nutrition, and food access, we can move leaps and bounds toward more food security and access and health for all.

Photos by Rizki Prayugo and Aniketh Kanukurthi

In 2018, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, 37 million Americans didn’t have enough to eat. At one point or another that year, in other words, they struggled to put food on the table.

But if you were to ask someone in China, they’d laugh amiably and follow up with another question: “What part of China are we talking about?” And it’s a good question—whether the food you crave is sweet or spicy, hearty or healing, you can find it in the Chinese kitchen.

Even growing up in a Chinese family, the diversity of Chinese food came as a surprise. I thought there were two types: Panda Express and the Cantonese food that my parents cooked. It wasn’t until I traveled through China, tasting everything from spice-laden cumin lamb to tropical coconut soup, that I realized how much I was missing. With thousands of years of history, 55 racial minorities, and 9.6 million square kilometers of land, China’s food culture is incredibly diverse. I learned to embrace my heritage by learning how to stir-fry, braise, and steam.

And yet the dominant view of Chinese food in the West is not only narrow, but tinged with prejudice. Growing up in a homogenous community in suburban New York, I was no stranger to words like “oily,” “cheap,” and “gross” being applied to the food of my heritage. On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal, but it reflects a deeper judgement about which cultures hold inherent value.

I always saw this as normal—just the way things were. But as COVID-19 has spread across the globe, so has anti-Chinese xenophobia. Across the world, businesses have banned customers of Chinese descent. Racial slurs fly freely. In March, an acquaintance of mine woke up in the hospital after being attacked by strangers for no reason other than his East Asian features.

I wanted to do something to help. But what?

I’m no politician. I’m not an Instagram influencer. But I do have a few skills that turn out to be surprisingly relevant. The first, which I practice on a day-to-day basis here at IDEO, is storytelling. The second is cooking, eating, and writing about food. It turns out, the combination of the two is a powerful thing.

I’m talking about gastrodiplomacy, the promotion of cultural awareness through food. As ingredients like kimchi, harissa, and turmeric have made their way into the mainstream, they’ve become a starting point for people to take an interest in other cultures. But while I’m encouraged to see signs of that trend with Chinese food, it’s nascent at best. And I want to help it grow.

And thus Journey East, a digital zine about Chinese food culture, was born. The name is an play on the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West (西遊記), which tells the story of a Buddhist monk venturing west from China along the Silk Road. It serves both as a nod to my personal journey from America to Asia, and a reminder of my core goal of shedding light on the beauty and diversity of Chinese cuisine.

I have so much to say on the topic of Chinese food that I could easily ramble on forever. To stay focused on my core goal, I wrote a set of design principles for Journey East:

1. Tell a human story. Food tastes better when you know the story behind it (I’ve always believed this, and researchers seem to think so, too). That’s why I start each issue with a history of the region and the reason I find it personally meaningful.
2. Make it a conversation. There are plenty of places that will hand you a list of ingredients and tell you how to cook them. There are fewer that invite you to ask “how” and “why”. Though I don’t claim to be an expert, I always encourage readers to reach out to me personally about the recipes I publish. The resulting conversations have been my favorite part about Journey East. (In particular, one of the highlights has been seeing a friend’s vegetarian takes on the recipes.)
3. Accessibility over authenticity. When it comes to food, it’s easy to get hung up on what's "authentic" or not. But much like design, some of the most innovative home cooking comes from constraints, which are visible in the incredible variety of food from the Chinese diaspora (did you know that you can stir-fry watermelon peel as a substitute for winter melon?) By starting each issue with an illustration rather than a photo, I encourage readers to think of my recipes as inspiration rather than instructions.

Launching Journey East has been rewarding in many ways. I’ve learned to pivot quickly, grown as an illustrator and writer, and expanded my culinary repertoire. After falling in love with the sambal-laden Malaysian oyster omelette and ketchup-infused Hong Kong pork chop rice, I’ve thrown out all my preconceptions about what ingredients “belong” in Chinese food. But the best part has been hearing from readers who learned something new. Opening hearts and minds won’t happen overnight, but if I can do even a little bit to help people see Chinese food and culture in a fresh light, I’ll consider it time well spent.

You can read previous issues of Journey East (and subscribe, if you’d like!) here.

Lo mein. Orange chicken. Honey walnut shrimp. If you ask the average American to name some Chinese food, they might go with some of these. Where I live now, in Japan, the answer could be ramen or gyoza.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.