From a Functional Necessity to a Stylish Product that Supports the Modern Parenting Journey

As a B2B company, Chongqing Bo Ao had been developing and manufacturing car seats for more than 20 years. But the company wanted to see if it could use its core manufacturing capabilities to expand into a direct-to-consumer business that would unlock a new stage of business growth. 

After successful collaboration and launch of ZUOWE, the home office chair brand, in 2021, Bo Ao leveraged operational learnings and the confidence to continue applying its core capabilities to more consumer products. It registered a new company that is focused on building new direct-to-consumer product categories, ZUOWE Technology, and approached IDEO with a new challenge — designing a new baby car seat for the modern generation of Chinese parents.

The idea to design a new baby car seat was also fueled by China's newly-revised minor protection law, which made use of child safety seats mandatory from June 1st 2021. However, when ZUOWE and IDEO looked at what was already an emerging baby car seat market in China, what stood out was the singular focus on safety and safety features across most international and domestic brands. 

The observation begged a question: In a category where safety is the most basic requirement, what are some unmet needs of the modern Chinese parents? How might these unmet needs inspire new product ideas and create meaningful differentiation for the new entrant in this category?

Tapping into hidden user needs

There are two closely-related questions the IDEO team needed to answer first: What kind of people are the new generation of parents in China? How will their style and approach to parenting affect their expectations for baby car seats? 

Taking into account the potentially different consumer needs in different geographies, the IDEO team carried out user research in Shanghai, a city that has more than 25 million people, and in the city of Taizhou in Zhejiang province, which has a population of 2 million. IDEO conducted in-depth home visits to local families, visited a large number of brick-and-mortar mom-and-baby shops, and interviewed people like specialized nurses, parenting experts, and child psychologists.

Despite the differences in consumer markets between the two cities, IDEO found distinct commonalities in the conversations with consumers.

During the research, IDEO also noticed a gap in the identity of the younger generation of Chinese parents. As independent individuals, they have a distinct personality and a clear sense of self, actively expressing themselves through their clothing and objects they own. When they become parents, however, this sense of self becomes weaker or even lost, and the child becomes the absolute center of attention. After being distinct individuals for many years, their identity shifts to being someone’s mom or dad in a matter of a day.

Chinese parents are eager to show their unique approach to parenthood in the same way that they used to express their sense of self, but many products on the market fail to respond to this emotional need. 

“Many baby products are designed for kids only, but not for parents,” adds Chuli Duan, Senior Design Researcher at IDEO.

The design research led to a big takeaway that became a cornerstone for the design approach: baby car seats should be designed not only for children, but also for parents. Safety is still paramount, but design cannot ignore parents’ emotional needs.

Integrating product and brand design through co-creation

The core findings from user research helped set the direction for this project. But as IDEO embarked on product design, there were two big challenges to overcome: IDEO needed to design a product within a tight timeline, and along the way, the team also had to help the client transform their thinking and ways of working during the design process.

ZUOWE wanted to launch the brand new product at an important industry trade show in just six months. However, the technical regulations and standards for baby car seats are very stringent. To ensure the project could be completed on time, IDEO needed to have a clear understanding of what the specific constraints were, and where design could play a role.

Bo Ao’s strength lies in its 20 years of experience in developing and manufacturing car seats for major domestic and international automotive brands, which has given the company the edge to overcome technical barriers and drive mass production. But the engineering and manufacturing mindset which may work for their legacy automotive clients, has now become  a barrier to its transformation into a direct to consumer brand. IDEO believes that helping clients acquire the mindset of building consumer products and brands is more critical than designing the product itself, because this mindset is what will help the company to move into the B2C space with confidence and achieve commercial success in the long term.

To address this, IDEO set up co-creation workshops, bringing together ZUOWE’s newly-formed baby car seat team, as well as manufacturing experts from their factories, to discuss design direction and details early on. 

The benefits were clear: It was easy to share feedback in a timely manner and make product design decisions very quickly.

For instance, when IDEO presented a design that emphasized natural textures during a workshop on brand positioning, a member from Bo Ao’s manufacturing team said, “This feels very different. This could become a major selling point,” and that they had “never seen” anything like it done by other baby car seat brands.

At another workshop during the product design phase, participants from different teams were divided into groups to prototype the seat using various on-site materials, and to discuss the feasibility of the solution. When people worked together in smaller groups, effective discussions naturally took place.

Driving mindset shift within client organization

The challenge of helping our clients to change their mindset was broken down into different parts of the project and moved forward in a subtle way. 

IDEO invited the ZUOWE team to participate in user research to see the faces of their potential consumers and listen to their authentic expressions. When the teams explored brand positioning, IDEO rendered the solution with high fidelity and presented the potential directions to customers on a product display page, as they would typically see in everyday shopping scenarios.

Throughout the project, IDEO also conceptualized different touchpoints and showed how they would leave a first impression on consumers in various scenarios across e-commerce, offline advertisements, and shop display counters.

Building consumer empathy through disruptive design

The result of this collaboration is called Maple, a baby car seat that has been successfully launched just in six months. Exceptionally fresh and natural, it speaks both to parents and the children.

The intentional choice of gentle colors and the use of wooden veneers on the back of the seat are meant to meet the aesthetics and lifestyles of young parents in China, and to make the seat highly adaptable to different scenarios. Whether Maple is placed at home, in the back seat of the car, or outside in a natural environment, it does not feel obtrusive, and can therefore be ideal for assisting parents in accompanying their children into different environments. A baby car seat can be an extension of the young parents’ fashion statement and self expression as intended.

For added practicality, IDEO selected a stain-resistant, easy-to-clean fabric, and designed the seat surface with a removable fabric for cleaning purposes. To improve safety, fabric was wrapped around the buckle, hiding the hard plastic and metal parts, further enhancing the comfort of the seat and providing a higher level of safety for children and parents.

"We didn't compromise and take shortcuts here because we're building a consumer-facing brand and details like this are very important… For the client, this type of input was very important, because we became extra team members on their core team, helping to enhance their capabilities through design," says Daniel Huang, Senior Design Lead at IDEO.

How has the design been received in the market?

 In March 2022, ZUOWE Technology launched the new Maple baby car seat across its main e-commerce channels. Despite the series of micro COVID outbreaks in China, within three months, Maple had already achieved better-than-predicted sales and received favorable comments about the look and quality of the car seat from the parents.

“We were previously focused on the product itself, thinking that it was enough to make a product that was relatively better than the competition in terms of functionality. But after working with IDEO, we have a deeper understanding of the power of human-centricity. We need to get to know our target consumers, pay attention to their unmet needs, and use the power of design to address them.” -  Jianwei Zhao, Head of the Maple Project, ZUOWE Technology.

As the product was in the market just for a few months, it is difficult to precisely evaluate the financial impact it will have on Bo Ao’s business. However, what is just as important to IDEO is the maturity of Bo Ao’ and ZUOWE Technology’s internal design capabilities, which will undoubtedly have a much longer-term impact on the company’s future development and business transformation.