kate spade new york has been an iconic fashion brand since the early 90s, when its handbags first stormed the Manhattan fashion scene. Since then, the company has expanded and evolved into a global lifestyle brand.

With e-commerce reshaping the retail landscape and redefining the role of brick and mortar stores in recent years, kate spade new york leadership asked: How can we make the kate spade new york specialty store experience, well, more special?

kate spade new york already held the key to a new way of thinking about a multichannel customer experience: a brand promise “to inspire her to lead an interesting life.” Hoping to bring that promise to life in store, they engaged IDEO to help make it happen. The solution was for kate spade new york to take the brand message from words to action in the form of a customized guest journey. The team created more than 100 design concepts and strategies for building a retail experience that rewards curiosity and sparks artistic and literary exploration.

“In partnership with IDEO, we spoke extensively with our customers and associates to better understand how we can provide the most engaging and fulfilling in-store experience,” said Mary Beech, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Kate Spade & Company. “The new store elements that we introduced speak to our customer’s personality and appetite for adventure while aiming to enhance engagement with new and existing customers.”

The team knew that striking the right balance of digital tools in in-store interactions was pivotal in allowing two people to have a more rich and collaborative face-to-face connection. The concepts include things like “pack a purse” to test drive how many everyday items can fit in different style handbags, cheeky “dare cards” that challenge customers to go on an exciting adventure with their new purchase, and digital moments like the “shoe selfie” platform that would allow a guest to share “I’m thinking about them” heels or just-purchased flats with her social network. IDEO live-prototyped a selection of concepts in stores around the country and saw a high correlation between customers’ positive reactions and their subsequent purchasing decisions.

“At kate spade new york, our brand promise is to inspire women to live a more interesting life,” said Jenica Myszkowski, Vice President of Stores at Kate Spade & Company. “Our new and improved guest journey experience puts our customers at the center, allowing us to more fully deliver on our brand promise in our retail stores with a stronger vision and purpose for our stores and our store teams.”

To deliver the newly envisioned guest service experience, the role of the sales associates needed to be redesigned, as well. The kate spade new york and IDEO team created a new role: the Muse, whose job is to live the brand promise of an interesting life and to inspire customers to do the same. The reimagined role ultimately shifted the focus in specialty stores from selling to inspiring and building long-lasting relationships with guests.

Athletes’ Performance and its subsidiary, Core Performance, were both founded on a single mission: to enhance human performance through a holistic approach to mindset, nutrition, movement, and recovery. Athletes’ Performance focused on elite professional athletes, and Core Performance provided corporate fitness programs and workouts for employees hoping to lead more healthful lives, and both found a footing in the competitive health and fitness market.

Faced with a challenge to redefine the brands, IDEO designers collaborated with the founder and integrated marketing team to unite Athletes’ Performance and Core Performance under one name that would cut across the health, fitness, and wellness markets to reach a full breadth of audiences and partners. Under a new name, EXOS, the teams created a brand identity system unified by its founding mission and focus on human performance.

For the new EXOS brand, IDEO designers created a visual language using “x” and “+” to highlight the progress from goals to achievement, as well as a system of interaction for athletes of all performance levels. The team also created a bespoke digital tool, outfitted with custom software, which gave designers both guidance within the brand guidelines and creativity to explore new products and contexts.

Imagine this: Your company has just gone through a $2 billion merger. You show up at work to find an invitation from the CEO asking you to help shape the bank’s future. This is what happened when Umpqua acquired Sterling Financial Corporation in 2014, doubling its size and resulting in the creation of the West Coast’s largest community bank overnight. With a mission to be “the world’s greatest bank,” CEO Ray Davis seized the moment to reinvest in design across the organization.

Umpqua asked IDEO to help examine the brand they had and take it to a new level. They wanted to find out: how can we leverage our strength and reputation by activating the brand in new ways to deepen employee and customer engagement and foster continued growth?

IDEO identified three core brand opportunities and a newly articulated purpose statement that became a launch pad for more than 15 different concepts to express the brand internally and externally.

Inside Umpqua, company evangelists handed out notebooks with tips on “how to be better-makers,” and associates now participate in collaborative design challenges through an internal tool built on IDEO’s OI Engine, software that fosters open innovation. The design challenges are drawing unprecedented participation of 84 percent among employees and are having a real impact on the organization. Of the five they’ve run in two years, the company has implemented three winning ideas including a buddy program for new hires or transferees that upwards of 1,000 associates could experience over the next year.

WATCH: Umpqua Bank on using the OI Engine platform

IDEO also worked with Umpqua’s team to conceive digital products including a new digital app called Raindrop that lets people bank in the way that they think about saving and spending, not the way a bank does. It’s due for release in 2016.

To introduce all of this work, IDEO set up an immersive exhibition at Umpqua’s headquarters in Portland. Teams large and small, including the executive and associates from across the company, walked through the exhibit and witnessed how the brand impacts every aspect of their business, from employee engagement to product development. It was signed on the spot by Davis, who invited employees to sign their names, too.

The sweltering summers in China can be insufferable—especially for people who like to wear jeans.

Lee Jeans, in its quest to boost its brand differentiation among an expanding market of apparel brands that also use fabric performance as their unique selling point, like Uniqlo and Levi’s, developed denim that’s cooler to wear during hot weather. It found a novel solution in an ancient material: jade. When woven into denim, crushed jade particles maintain the coolest temperature and, alongside other technological enhancements made to the fabric, pull sweat away from the body. The fabric dries quickly, creating a refreshing cooling sensation.

The immense popularity of jade in China makes the denim a natural fit for Lee’s Asian market, and although Lee’s jade-infused fabric was entirely unique, the company needed to differentiate its inventive new product from a rapidly expanding market of high-tech fabric alternatives made specifically for hot weather.

Lee and its parent company, VF Corporation, saw an opportunity to create a new product that helps position the company not just as a premium brand, but one that leads with innovation. Lee came to IDEO to help design the go-to-market and launch strategy for the new line of jade-infused fabric. Looking for insight, designers conducted research in multiple cities in China and India, seeking out those who were committed to wearing jeans despite the most extreme circumstances—the denim-clad bicyclists pedaling through sweltry city streets, the basketball players on the court, commuters who stripped to their underwear while driving and wriggled back into their jeans upon arrival. The common thread: They were all steadfast in their preference for thick, heavy denim, no matter how hot it got.

The resulting strategy for product launch: positioning jade—a traditional material that has strong cultural and spiritual meaning—as a high-tech solution for the contemporary lifestyle of young people. IDEO helped Lee name the new line JadeFusion and created a system of messaging to communicate that these aren’t just jeans—they’re jeans with a fascinating narrative woven within; a hierarchy of messaging that blends jade’s exotic premium significance with a very modern technical story. Lee salespeople learned how to share the story with customers, encouraging them to talk about jade-cooling technology at work, on the streets, and even on the basketball court.

The JadeFusion line sold out within seven weeks of its debut. The launch, which was originally limited to mainland China and Hong Kong, was expanded to India, Malaysia, and Thailand, and sales orders doubled for the following year. Along the way, Lee developed a new understanding of how to incorporate customers’ input and be open to discovery and inspiration from the very start of planning a product launch.

When we get an auto-responder, the feeling is generally one of mild disappointment, indifference, or doom, depending on how urgent your request was.

If I took the time to compose something better, I wondered, would anyone take the time to read it? Was there a way—an opportunity, even—to shift the entire auto-responder interaction from one of scarcity (nobody’s home) to abundance (well that just made my day)?

The question became:

"How might we take one of the most automated voices we still offer to the world and make it more human?"

I started to experiment:

"I will be in a workshop this week rendering response time erratic and unpredictable. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and invite you to celebrate this moment by testing the varied edges and new limits of patience this may evoke. Who knows where it may lead? I will be back to you as soon as possible. I promise. Thank you!"

Then got a little bolder:

"I will be impossibly slow to respond today as I am currently seated deep within the bowels of our criminal justice system doing my bit as potential juror #xxxxx for Kings County. I urge patience and self management, and that's just for myself.... I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

Today you will most likely receive:

"I am abroad with the most inconsistent wifi I have ever experienced. It's the substantiation of mindfulness, the invitation to a million moments paused in the belligerent now. I will pick up with you again on July 10th when I am back in New York where the data flows like a subterranean stream and the hours are neither here nor there. Thank you for your patience in the meantime."

People responded. They read them. They liked them! And the fact that they got a momentary zing out of these absurdist missives did much to relieve my guilt over dodging people's requests. I also learned a few things along the way.

3 design principles for how to write a better OOO:

1. Insert an element of surprise
   Moments of surprise in the mundane matter exponentially. I have received many many bemused responses. From close colleagues to clients to absolute strangers. It instantaneously bonds us and shifts the exchange from “I have a request or need” to “I see and hear you.” When I eventually return and execute on that request, there are new connections, filamenty kinship has grown between us through humor and surprise. From that foundation we accomplish more, usually with speed, which is ironic when you think that the communication started with a stunting. Not particularly auspicious. This creates space for possibility.
2. Do not concede to the bot!
   Bots are helpful, available, and dare I say it, adorable at times. But to compete with them we must use our all too human, weird, silly, grammatically inconsistent voices. Besides, if they are learning from us anyway we may as well give them some good material to work with.
3. Upend expectations by being yourself
   I work in leading talent for IDEO. I'm proud of that craft. But I’m also an MFA, a poet, and you may be able to tell, a bit of a weirdo. The moment I gave myself permission to be myself in all of my communications with people—even the dryest most official ones—people started responding in kind. Free yourself and the rest will follow.

We all operate in a world where we bump up against other’s expectations or assumptions of who we are on a daily basis. Those assumptions don't change on their own—that's your job! And it's as easy as writing a good OOO email! I am not HR, I’m HCH. Hello.

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The dreaded OOO. You've probably already gotten one today. The tone is usually perfunctory, most likely generated by a bot, or a bot-like impulse on behalf of the sender, who is hastily trying to sign off before that vacation, workshop, excuse to get away for five minutes of uninterrupted peace.

I found this outside of a grocery shop in Tokyo. Someone used the plastic bottle to replace the broken rain gutter. You can tell from the scratches on the plastic that the water bottle has been there a while, outlasting countless rainstorms. Who knew a water bottle could be so strong!

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

In 2016, with only a college internship in archaeology under my belt, I stumbled on a social media post calling for volunteers to dig in Jerusalem. Before I knew it, I was winging my way to Israel with knee pads, sweat bands, and plenty of SPF 50. I spent two to three weeks of each of the following summers in Jerusalem with Dig Mount Zion, helping excavate priestly homes from the time of Jesus, Roman mosaics and frescos, and hints of bloody Crusader battles.

I returned from my latest session in a dusty Jerusalem pit in July to start my new gig as an editor at IDEO. Believe it or not, being a part-time Dirt Hound has really helped my work. How?

1. Archaeology sparks curiosity

I knew nothing about design when I started at IDEO. Likewise, before college I knew zilch about archaeology beyond what I’d seen on TV. The aggressive learning curve kicked me out of my comfort zone and forced me to ask questions of everyone, all the time. What’s a sherd, or for that matter a fill, a balk, or a locus? How did people live in the time of King David or King Herod, and how do we know?

Constantly asking questions can make you feel a bit naive, but I’ve found this sort of curiosity is a great way to learn fast, shake up stagnant systems, and radically expand my view of what’s possible.

Designers know this well. They start with questions: How might we incorporate VR into online experiences? Why are schools bound by four walls? Could play help prisoners? This inquisitive, unbiased approach is what allows them to identify fundamental needs and find creative solutions.

In the same way, I try to broach new concepts I come across, such as designing for social change, with no preconceived ideas, and keep poking and prodding until I unearth the story.

2. Hard labor can be good for you

In pop culture, archaeologists find perfectly preserved, fully excavated structures (I’m looking at you, Indy). But in reality, someone has to remove tons of dirt and rock; sweep the area with a metal detector; sketch and photograph the features of the site; wash, sort, and catalogue finds—and then begin again the next day, on the next layer of earth. Slowly, a complete picture is revealed. It’s meticulous, backbreaking work.

At the Jerusalem dig site, the physical challenges and my lack of formal training helped me understand my limits and accept guidance from the seasoned archaeologists in charge. At the same time, the digs showed me that I’m capable of withstanding heat, stress, language barriers, and lots of pickaxing. These experiences have given me confidence that I can master a new language—design—and tackle stories about IDEO’s most complex, cross-cultural projects.

3. Digs build trust & teamwork

In a given year, Dig Mount Zion includes about 15 staff, 20 students, and 60 wide-eyed volunteers. Participants range from 18 to 86 and hail from Germany, Russia, the Philippines, Canada, New Zealand, and beyond. Being tossed into a pit in 95-degree heat and told to move a mountain of dirt has bonded complete strangers into fast friends.

Working in a place so steeped in history, alongside people from all walks of life—from an Ohio school bus driver to a Messianic Jewish missionary to a particle physicist—helped me build trust and tolerance and let me glean wisdom from people with radically different points of view.

Likewise, diversity of experience and perspective on a single project is IDEO's secret sauce. Our designers have created everything from apps to amps to appliances and I'm charged with capturing those inventions in a way that's easy to understand. Archaeology has prepared me well to incorporate new modes of thinking and work with colleagues from Silicon Valley to Shanghai.

Hopefully, they won’t mind all the dirt under my fingernails.

Photos courtesy of Rachel Ward. For more, please contact rwardphotoclt@gmail.com.

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When I was eight, I defected from a high-stakes game of summer camp capture-the-flag to hunt for fossils in a nearby creekbed. Twenty years later, I still obsess about all things ancient—the first civilizations, the evolution of religious thought, and the latest dinosaur find. If this is a phase, I never grew out of it. In fact, I’ve become something of an amateur archaeologist, with surprising benefits for my work life.

Here are the top 5 things I tell my students about nourishing creativity and thinking like a designer:

Be curious

Without curiosity we do not learn and we won't grow. The same holds true for organizations. An organization that is not curious and not willing to learn will not be able to grow in today's business environment.

Challenge assumptions

In 2015, a group of students at Lund university challenged the IKEA purpose “design for many” and added a new perspective to it. What if IKEA was not the provider of solutions (the assumption) but the provider of a framework to foster people's creativity (the challenge)? The IKEA Hacka modular kitchen design is a beautiful example of how new ideas can spring from challenging assumptions.

Get lost in dreams

I don't want to accept that we have lost a whole generation to screens and devices. Creativity happens when we stop and let go. When we don’t know where to go, when we daydream and let our thoughts flow.

And research limited to what you can find online won't cut it. Insight comes from observing real people in real life. Students should have that luxury, and we should provide permission and space for that in organizations.

Get into a question-framing mindset

Design students often start their creative process by translating insights into problem statements. But you can't identify a problem without asking a bigger question first. So how do we get there? When we find the right opportunity space for a team to tackle, creativity flows.

Collaborate

I believe that all of us are better together. We've reached a time when collaboration is not just about individual work patterns, but also about what happens across systems, organizations, and governments.

Unfortunately, too many leaders seem to fall back on trying to solve things themselves, then ask those around them to do their bidding—often with rather unfortunate results.

But today's students—the next generation of leaders—have grown up in a sharing economy where not just goods, but also values are exchanged. And that keeps me optimistic about the future.

Taking this approach, my students and I have produced hundreds of design concepts, many of which have been published and exhibited. Spectrum, a project I co-led with designer Stefan Diez, was recently shown at the Salone di Mobili in Milan. And a workshop at the University of Lund produced the IKEA concept kitchen. As the school year approaches, I look forward to watching young designers come up with more bright ideas.

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For more than 10 years, I've taught design in places like the University of Lund in Sweden, the HfG Offenbach in Germany, and Parsons School of Design. Teaching inspires me, challenges me, helps me question my point of view on design, and keeps me connected to the next generation. My students often start out with a problem-solver mindset and want to rely on technology. I encourage them, instead, to start with a question, large or small, that puts humans at the center.

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.