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.

At least that's what the listeners of Studio 360 said when host Kurt Andersen asked them to suggest places or experiences that could use more joy as part of the WNYC radio program’s Redesigns series. Inspired by IDEO Design Director Ingrid Fetell’s Aesthetics of Joy blog, our New York team did an extreme Monday makeover—in three weeks.

But first, the team interviewed the founder of a pet-therapy program and explored the physical and emotional benefits of chuckling with a laughter yoga teacher. A teammate’s 5-year-old daughter, quickly dubbed the “giggler-in-residence,” upped the joy quotient, as only a small child can do.

The result is MonYay!, a collection of objects and digital concepts designed to make Mondays fundays.

Listen to the Studio 360 episodes and check out our microsite to get a behind-the-scenes peek into the design process.

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The shrill beep of an alarm clock. The rush-hour commute. A calendar that looks like a failed game of Tetris. Of all the weekdays, Monday looks most like a problem in search of a solution.

Part of Project Literacy, a campaign founded and convened by Pearson, the installation is intended for large, influential gatherings like the General Assembly of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, and the Social Good Summit, so the concept needed to scale to different physical contexts. But because the goal was to reach a much wider audience, there had to be a way to distribute the work easily through digital channels.

IDEO had just eight weeks to research the topic, develop ideas, test them with users, and build both physical and digital prototypes. Along with Toronto-based content studio Secret Location, who executed the concept, IDEO and Pearson launched a stunning virtual reality installation at Davos in January. In conversation with Ed White, designers Martin Brown, Kate Burn, and Jure Martinec reveal the backstory of prototyping with the new technology, including software and storytelling tips for others beginning to work in the medium.

What inspired you to use VR?

Jure: It was clear that we would have to find an engaging way of stepping into the shoes of those challenged by illiteracy. It wasn’t just about showing some confusing scrambled text on a website, which is forgettable in seconds. The problem is often marginalized, so we had to do more than just show it. We had to make people really feel it. VR seemed like a natural choice.

Martin: Chris Milk and Spike Jonze have done some great stuff with their VR platform Vrse, particularly “Clouds Over Sidra,” which is the story of a girl living her life in a Syrian refugee camp. The feeling that you’re actually, physically there in the camp with her is intense. Chris Milk calls VR “the ultimate empathy machine,” and he’s right. No amount of statistics or explaining can substitute for the visceral empathy that VR is capable of creating. Though the medium is still very much in the experimental phase—a bit like the early days of film—we felt there was a very compelling opportunity to use it to create empathy for a situation like illiteracy, which many people find impossible to imagine.

What other avenues did you explore to express this story?

Martin: We looked at a lot of different possibilities. We really wanted people to experience illiteracy from the inside, so we thought about immersive theatre, in the vein of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, or You Me Bum Bum Train, or even physically immersive games or puzzles that the audience would need to solve, similar to Hinthunt. We really felt that we needed a physical aspect to the experience, because no matter how good a digital-only solution might be, the age of truly viral content seems to be over, and without a huge marketing push, it would be incredibly hard to cut through all the cat videos on the Internet.

Why was VR a good choice for the presentation and distribution needs of this project?

Martin: Because VR is so new, it really suits an exhibition context where users can experience it for the first time in a guided and controlled setting. At the same time, the availability of Google VR, Samsung Gear VR and even YouTube VR meant that it was also something that could spread beyond the initial exhibition and be experienced anywhere.

What was your process for prototyping in VR?

Jure: We tried many different experiences, from simple gimmicky Cardboard apps to quite strong Gear VR narratives and cutting-edge Oculus Rift examples, also using extensions such as Leap Motion. I spent a lot of time tripping over things and waving my hands around the office. Once we had a somewhat good understanding of the dos and don’ts of the medium, we made the first script, recorded some sound on a laptop, and played it over Google StreetView’s VR view to see what a first person, in-the-scene narrative feels like and got some quick feedback. Then we tested interactions to find out how the story would feel if we broke linearity. We took a basic Cardboard example in Unity and tweaked it to show a static scene with interactive hotspots. This let us finalize the script as well as define the assets we needed for final production.

Kate: We invited a few of the people we'd met during our research interviews to help us test, iterate, and develop the prototype. This was potentially very nerve-wracking! We were very conscious of how easy it might be to misrepresent, patronize, or trivialize the issues surrounding illiteracy, and we sought feedback from pre-literate people and our expert adult literacy teachers at a midpoint in the design to ensure we were communicating people's experiences accurately and respectfully.

What hardware, software, and coding languages did you use, and why?

Jure: The scene had two major requirements: It needed to feel realistic and the hotspots had to be in optimal positions. So although live-action video would have been great, it would be hard to iterate on it quickly. Instead, we went for a fully custom photorealistic 3D render to set the direction for the feeling and interactions of the story. We hit a bit of a wall with Unity, but luckily there was an Android developer floating around. Since at that point it was clear what we needed to make, we wrote a pretty dirty Cardboard/GearVR app directly in Java. Just to put it in context, I think it took us around a week and a half for all of this.

What were the technical challenges that came with designing in VR?

Jure: The medium is fairly new, so unlike when you design apps or websites, there are few approachable tools that help you prototype and learn quickly. None of us had really worked with VR before, but that was just another excuse to go for it. Luckily there is a lot of talk online about how to design for the medium, and pioneering companies like Google are sharing tools like Cardboard Design Lab. Their Cardboard SDK is also quite accessible, so it was easy to get started. If you’re familiar with game engines like Unity, you can quickly create advanced experiences for many different platforms, including the Oculus Rift. As WebVR is being pushed, frameworks are starting to pop up and many web developers are suddenly in the VR world as well.

What were the storytelling considerations you faced in VR?

Martin: Everything is so new that there is no rulebook. Google, among others, is starting to codify what the language of VR filmmaking should be, but no one really knows. For example, who or what is the viewpoint you’re looking from? Is it invisible, like in film? Possibly, but that somehow feels weird, like you’re a voyeur. We intuitively felt like you had to be experiencing the scene from the first person.

What are your technical tips for coders prototyping in VR?

Jure: Be smart and inventive. Yes, you can make very complex things, but it's really fun to think about how you can learn with smart interactions and storytelling. Also, be mindful of the platform you're designing for. A Google Cardboard app will be much less immersive than an Oculus Rift app, but on the other hand, it will be much more accessible to people. Think of who you're designing for and why.

What about filmmaking tips for budding VR directors and videographers?

Martin: Prototype and test everything. Traditional filmmaking took decades to figure out the basic tropes. I think that as VR filmmaking evolves, things will become standardized, but it’s the Wild West at the moment. For now, simplicity wins. The audience is so wowed just to be there, inside a movie, that you don’t need to resort to a lot of tricks to keep people entertained.

What do you see as the most exciting potential for the technology moving forward?

Jure: VR is becoming big. Technical standards are being established, making development and prototyping tools more powerful and accessible for developers. As platforms like Google Cardboard and Oculus grow, their distribution channels are lowering the barrier of adoption for developers and viewers. The medium is maturing, so the content is becoming much more engaging, with rich storytelling, which almost forces big production companies to move into the field. Things are definitely happening soon.

Martin: There’s that story about the Lumière brothers in 1895, screening a film of a train arriving at a station. People in the theatre, who had never seen moving pictures before, ran away because they thought they’d get hit. That’s where we’re at with VR. It’s raw and unsophisticated but still incredibly visceral, and because of that, it’s powerful. I think it has the capacity to be the dominant art form of the 21st century—like film was for the 20th. I really think it will be that big. We just might need a few decades to figure out how to make it work best.

If you’re reading this now, chances are you have no idea what it’s like to navigate the world without full literacy. In May 2015, Pearson asked IDEO to design an experience that would inspire empathy for the struggles of people with illiteracy.

For human-centered designers, there is nothing more valuable than discovering what matters to people—what triggers frustration and what provides ease, what brings grief and what sparks joy. That’s why IDEO studies subtle and often unspoken details of daily life: habits, circumstances, thoughts, feelings, and reactions. We rely upon access to people’s unguarded selves. Their trust is precious, and comes with responsibility. How do we seek and share insights about people’s lives in an ethical way?

Three timeless principles guide all our work: respect, honesty, and responsibility. While the concepts are well known, they’re abstractions that resist concrete definition, and applying them to the ambiguities, complexities, and messy scenarios of real life is no simple task. The Little Book of Design Research Ethics provides a practical guideline, along with tools and examples from IDEO's work in the field. It integrates more than a quarter century of IDEO experience with advice and recommendations from ethicists, as well as codes of conduct in related professions, from journalism to market research. Though it was originally created for IDEO designers, the book offers applicable guidance to a wide range of situations in which it’s crucial to build relationships of trust. It’s the first of its kind, and we hope it will facilitate ongoing conversation and reflection about what it means to work with empathy and cultural sensitivity and ensure that interactions are safe, fair, enjoyable, and mutually beneficial.

Download the book here.

Downloaded more than 3,000 times online, Masi’s flowing font has got into the hands of quantified-self posterboy Nicholas Felton, photographer Todd Selby, and our very own David Kelley (founder of IDEO). We sat down to talk about her inspiration for Masi Font, her policeman-calligrapher grandfather, and why she thinks handwriting is one of the last modes of self-expression.

Where did your love of typography come from?

It started in elementary school. Learning to write was an obsession. I thought it was drawing beautiful things, rather than learning how to write words. If I made even a tiny mistake I would tear the page apart and start all over again. I would fill up pages with just one letter, repeated over and over again. Sometimes I would do other kids’ homework so that I had more to write.

Do you come from a family of artists?

My grandpa, Amedeo Masi, was a Carabiniere (a member of the Italian national police force) and a calligrapher. I know, such a random combo, and he made his own house sign (above). Calligraphy used to be a subject in school in Italy. Having a beautiful handwriting was really important at the time—it meant you'd had a good education.

Who inspires you, and why?

Growing up in Italy, I was exposed to so many incredible logos and identities that haven’t changed. Everything stays 60s classic.

When I started my design studies in Rome, Vignelli (who made the original New York subway identity) was my main inspiration. I loved the way he used Helvetica with simple and effective graphics. Bob Noorda, was another great inspiration. When I worked for In Area (the Pentagram of Italy), I refreshed the design of the Milan Underground, and I loved how we made Helvetica cool in Italy.

Munari, was another great inspiration. His friendly and simple style really resonated with me. His kids’ books are so clean but so playful at the same time. His style brings magic to everything, and that’s what I want to do too.

Once I moved to the Netherlands, Experimental Jetset and Wim Crowel also inspired me so much. I loved how they used typography in spaces, books, and museums.

What was the first font you created?

I created my first font, Cerchio Futuro, at university. It was a really rounded/modular font based on one unit (that’s the constraint they gave us). I hated it, but I got the highest mark in the class and was featured in a book Metodologia Progettuale Del Graphic Design (below).

You've talked about how important it is to have your own font. Why?

In this fucking digital world, no one writes by hand anymore. So, having a font is the truest visual expression of your mind and craft. No iPhone can take your handwriting away from you!

How did you develop the Masi font?

I never thought about creating my own font, but people really liked the way I wrote, and they kept asking me to "Masify" things. I realized I could just create a font that everybody could use, but I was overwhelmed by the technicalities of creating one.

Luckily my boyfriend, Alan, showed me this website where you can just download a form, print it, and fill in the blocks. Rescan the form, and—voila—I created my first Masi font. It’s not exactly the same fidelity as the handwritten font, which I hated for a long time, but after a while I liked the fact that the only original Masi font still comes from me.

What does the font say about you?

That I’ve stayed a kid forever, that I don’t want to grow up. Peter Pan, you know. That even if it looks consistent, each letter is different, every time.

Any Easter Eggs buried within?

If you type certain letters you’ll see "tits" (Ö) and "lemons" (]) LOL.

Download the Masi Font here.

Look across the London studio’s stationery boxes, pet projects, and the odd client deliverable, and you can’t miss the handwritten flourish of Enrica Masi. Despite being an interaction designer, Masi is a firm believer in the physicality and imperfection of penmanship. It's a manifestation of personality, she says, which spurred her to lead the London studio in an exercise to create their very own font.

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.