Context
Emma Sleep is a German mattress company, which in 2021 won numerous international awards for their new top-of-the-line model the Emma Motion. This encouraged them to expand into the US market, so they hired IDEO to ensure their customer experience matched the new elevated quality of their product.
Process
Over the course of three months, we worked together with the client, including a month embedded in IDEO’s San Francisco offices. It was a decision-heavy process, so working in tandem allowed us to rapidly align on needs and solutions.
A lot of the project was about re-imagining their brand for the US market, including conducting qualitative research with American audiences. While Emma was seen as a budget player in Europe, for the US our team needed to shift the brand upmarket to align with their new high tech mattress. The new branding reframed the mattress as “a worthwhile indulgence” - and was supported by the mattresses’s internal technology which anticipated and automatically adjusted to sleepers through ought the night.
Role
As the project progressed, I was directed to tackle how to bring their new brand direction to life with discrete moments of user experience. My focus areas were primarily :
Designing interactive installations for their mattress showrooms
Re-envisioning their customer journey and identifying new customer experiences
Outcomes
Some of the concepts I developed for the client included:
A considerate home delivery process.
A customizable space for showrooms so customers can envision their perfect sleep sanctuary
To further explore the idea of indulgence with Emma sleep, this concept allowed customers to customize the atmosphere of their own “sleep sanctuary” via a touchscreen in a mock bedroom. Customers could adjust lighting mood, soundscape, and scents in the space to find their perfect sleeping environment.
When customers would lay down on the bed, a pressure sensitive layer would record where their pressure points lay across various sleeping positions. When they got up, they could see how their pressure was distributed as shown in a colored heat map projected down onto the bed at full scale. This mapping highlighted how they needed different types of firmness as they moved around in their sleep - and only the Emma Motion could automatically self adjust to support them.
We wanted the customer experience to feel like it always anticipated customers’ needs, just like their mattress. We created a special part of the purchase flow where customers could share their “house rules” with the delivery team. Customers could specify things like if there were any pets to watch out for, or if it was a shoes on or off household.
An educational installation for showrooms so customers could see how the mattress responds to their sleeping positions
Conclusion
This was the first time that Emma Sleep partnered with a human-centered design firm, and we made a point to include them in the process from concept through to testing. They appreciated our collaborative, transparent approach and wrapped the project with a tangible view of their future as a brand. They are carrying the work forward as they prepare their launch in the US market.