Rettractive heels

The Product

The product is an adjustable height heel shoe. When released onto the market, it will be the latest, most unique and technological advanced high heel shoe available. The company’s name is Rettractive Heels. Rettractive Heels will manufacture many different designs of this shoe to target a range of buyers and tastes. The designs will range in style. The five styles will be: classy, sophisticated, formal, elegant and ultra-modern.

The basic design of the adjustable height heel shoe is very much like any other high heel shoe, except the height of the heel is able to be adjusted, which provides unprecedented versatility for its wearers.

Why Is This Product Needed?

High heels create many illusions. They make people look taller, slimmer and make their legs and posture look more shapely. People wear high heels to enrich their beauty, improve their physical appearance and, in some instances, to increase their chances of becoming the centre of attraction. Some women simply cannot live without high heels. High heels have become tremendously important in a woman’s life in modern society. Heels are worn by women everyday in the workplace, at nightclubs, parties, weddings and other social occasions. Today, more than ever before, we live in a society obsessed with image and appearance. Women are willing to spend a large percentage of their disposable income on accessories, like high heels, which will help them meet society’s expectations of beauty.

High heels are donned by many women all over the western world, yet, high heels, like many things in life, are flawed; they have cons as well as pros. High heels can be ridiculously uncomfortable, cause the wearer immense pain, and can also cause women short and long term physical problems especially in the back, feet and knee areas. Heels can also give women an unnatural gait.

It is safe to say that women in the modern western world, a world obsessed with external beauty, don’t want to stop wearing heels, but what they do want is the choice to buy a new versatile heel that will be able to alleviate the problems that stem from wearing ‘standard’ heels which flood the shoe market today. This is why there is a place in the market for the adjustable height heel. As women, we understand women’s love-hate relationship with high heels and it is this love-hate relationship which was the catalyst for this new product. Our own experiences, common to many women, sparked our idea for this product.

How Does the Product Work?

The adjustable height heel shoe is designed to help women make a transition from the workplace to the social scene at 5 pm without carrying another pairs of shoes. The adjustable height heel allows women to be comfortable in the workplace throughout the day, and heighten their heel at the end of the day when they meet friends for after-work drinks. The adjustable height heel shoe also gives women the option to lift their heel for important board meetings or client visits or lower their heel in the evening if they are going straight home.

The shoe is also designed to help women relax at the end of a long party without taking their shoes off! When they are feeling tired, have to walk home or meet somebody smaller than themselves, they can simply lower their heels to take the pressure off their feet and bodies. This will stop the aching legs and feet that many women complain of at the end of a night.

The shoe is designed to be adjusted by up to seven centimeters. It works by a simple catch system. Women simply press a button and push the heel up or down to suit. This is known as an adjustable gauge. A thin, long bar made of steel is inserted through the middle of the heel lengthways and can be pressed in to move the heel up and down. Small holes are inserted along the heel which determine the different heights of the heel. This adjustable gauge is used in many devices today, such as home appliances, and can also be found in tools.(a diagram might be useful here)

Competition

This heel is new to the market, our only competition is a company known as Camileon Heels who have launched a similar product. Their invention is a shoe with an adjustable heel that you can take off, so there is only one possible adjustment to the shoe that can be made; from high to low. The shoe is easy to adjust and simple yet elegant in its design and looks as though it is targeted more towards the business woman. However, our shoe is able to adjust without having to take any parts off the shoe, so its easier and simpler and there is no chance of misplacing the heel when you take it off and there is no need to carry a bag with our shoe. Our shoe can also be adjusted to many different heights instead of just one.

Many online articles suggest that many females like the idea of the camileon heel, but at the same time, the majority were also worried it may fall off surprisingly, without any notice. Our adjustable height heel will assure potential buyers that it won’t let them down. Individuals will just need to take the time to get used to it. Any new product takes time to convince consumers to buy and trust it, therefore a lot of promotional marketing will be needed in order to make this product successful and separate it from the camileon heel.

We want woman to feel and look great after a night out or a day at work. We are hoping this will be the heel of the future. This heel will bring so many advantages to womens lives. This includes not having to carry extra pairs of shoes in your handbag in case you wont be able to walk anymore after a night out, there will be no more painful/sore feet or damage to other body parts.

Market Analysis

This new product will be an exclusive product marketed to working women who occupy the professional space and young adults who occupy the social scene, love fashion, nightlife, going to clubs and parties. The adjustable height heel which targets women in the workplace will sell for slightly less than the heel that will target women who occupy the social scene, because the former will be more basic in style. The top end heel will sell from around $200 a pair due to the new technology of the shoe material which includes silicon, hence, the material will feel stretchy and have a rubber feel to it. The top end shoes will also made from the finest leathers.

We decided on our target audience based on our own experiences as young female adults, and on a survey given out to different aged groups of females. We also took on board the comments and reviews that were made about our competitor, to make our product better. We asked the surveyed groups questions, such as how often they wear high heels, whether it is to work or out to nightclubs and what they think of the Rettractive heel concept. The majority of the female members were very impressed with the product and excited to see when the product would be released.

Generation of Ideas

Rettractive Heels is a new high heel brand that embodies progress in footwear technology.The company values quality, choice and function and these values are reflected in the product. Women wearing this shoe should feel comfortable, stylish, and flexible and welcome this shoe with open arms after years of suffering with aches and pains cause by the standard and restrictive high heel shoe. This product means that women dont have to suffer wearing heels and they dont have to give up on the idea of wearing heels.

The Idea Generation stage was extremely important as it helped us create the final product and helped our New Product Development Team and our brand meet standards. Rettractive Heels to date have incorporated the values of quality, choice and function in the shoe and therefore, we place great emphasis on the Idea Generation stage as it helped us to interpret what primary values we wanted the shoe to reflect and what our valued customers need and want.

To maintain our companys reputation, the New Product Development Team at Rettractive Heels will hold meetings to recognise the current technologies of footwear on the market, look at different reviews of our product and discuss how we could further improve our product and deliver it to our consumers. These methods will prompt Idea Generation amongst the New Product Development Team.

All ideas have to come from somewhere. The New Product Development Team began by brainstorming ideas of new products, and from this brainstorm many different ideas were communicated. Each idea was then discussed, ranked and categorised under pros and cons columns. From there the team chose the idea that they thought they would be able to expand on and adapt easily into our society and from there the adjustable height heel shoe was born.

The primary inspiration for the Rettractive heel came from an idea from one of our New Product Development Team members, who noticed a lot of complaints from females after a night out about their heels and noticed that the majority of females at midnight were wandering around with bare feet due to sore heels at the end of the night which is an unattractive look, especially when dressed up. The group jumped on the idea of an adjustable heel. The group then continued brainstorming this final idea, and writing down how we can further improve the standard heel. We decided to take the technology to the next stage and produce an adjustable height heel that women can work by just pressing a button to heighten or lower their heel, a simple and unique operation.

The focus of this product was quality, flexibility and function which work together to remove the discomfort that other footwear creates in an individuals life.

Screening

By brainstorming and analyzing the pros and cons of the teams ideas, the Product Development Team at Rettractive narrowed down the suggestions to the ones that we thought would actually be the most feasible. The ideas that were chosen were then submitted to a screening process in order to find out which idea had the greatest market potential and which was achievable and workable.

The ideas which we decided as a team to screen were the adjustable height heel and a garbage bag that has an adhesive strip at the top so the bag doesn’t fall into the bin. Both ideas were screened to interpret which idea would have the most market demand and would be most successful for the firm. We all did some thorough research about each product and we realized that the garbage bag idea would have too broad a market and therefore it would be difficult to determine who our consumers would be. Whereas the adjustable height heel had a more specific market to target and it is something that we felt women will be more fond and interested in. As there are many garbage bag creations around, we also thought that we would have to go against more competitors whereas there is only one competitor for our current product. So we came to the conclusion that the adjustable height heel would be the more relevant product, as we would be able to identify who our target market would be and identify the business prerequisites that our contemporary product is expected to fulfill more clearly. The strategic role screening was another process we tried and the adjustable heels proved to be a success as the Rettractive Heel is aimed at the growth markets. The only competitor we found that was similar to the Rettractive heel was a company known as Camileon Heels which was also an adjustable heel but to change the height of the shoe you have to take the heel off which limits its adjustability to only two sizes. Therefore we took this on board and developed it further and tried to make it a better and more feasible idea.