Business Model

Module 1: Design Thinking

1.1.1 Introduction to Design Thinking

What is Design Thinking?

Tim Brown presented a fantastic definition of Design Thinking:

“Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s
toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for
business success.”
Design Thinking is a strategy for creative problem solving by prioritizing customers’
requirements above everything else. It helps to engage a person in several opportunities like
experimenting and creating a prototype model, gathering feedback from customers and
redesigning the product using innovative solutions. You can apply design thinking to various
fields such as architecture, engineering, business, etc.
Design Thinking is a solution-based approach where you focus on finding solutions to the
problems in contrast to the problem-based approach. The problem-based thinking approach
focuses on finding obstacles and limitations on why a problem exists.
1.1.2. History of Design Thinking
Design thinking essentially came into view between the 50s and 60s. While there is no
particular event that can pinpoint the origins of this concept, both the industrial revolution and
World War II pushed the boundaries of the emergence of Design thinking. Engineers, architects,
industrial designers, and cognitive scientists, at the time, came together in understanding
creative and collective problem solving – which was driven by the significant societal changes
then.
The first authors that discussed the idea of design thinking were John E. Arnold
in Creative Engineering (1959) and L. Bruce Archer in Systematic Method for
Designers (1965). However, a cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate, Herbert
A. Simon was the first individual to mention design thinking as a ‘way of
thinking’ and as an approach. This was seen in 1969, in his book, The Sciences of
the Artificial. He continued to contribute many ideas throughout the 70s which are
now regarded as principles of design thinking.
By the 1970s, design thinking combined human resources, and technological and strategic needs
of our times and progressively managed to develop over the decades. It has now become one of
the leading innovative methodologies existing today.
1.1.3. Why is Design Thinking Important?
If you think like a designer, it can transform how your organisation develops products, services,
processes, and strategies. It brings together the desirability from the customer’s perspective with
what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also provides various opportunities
for people who aren’t trained as designers to utilise creative tools so that they can tackle a vast
range of problems/challenges.
There are also some essential aspects in which design thinking helps, and they are:
 The main objective is to solve the customer’s requirements
 Helps in tackling ambiguous and challenging problems
 Drives people to create innovative solutions
 It helps organisations to run faster with more efficiency

1.1.4. Principles of Design Thinking

Empathy: Understanding the user’s context, emotions, and experiences, empathy enables
managers to connect with customers on a deeper level, leading to solutions that genuinely
address users’ needs.
Collaboration: Bringing together diverse teams fosters creativity. Design Thinking thrives on
interdisciplinary collaboration, allowing managers to gain new perspectives and generate
innovative solutions.
Experimentation: Design Thinking values trial and error, allowing ideas to evolve through
prototyping and testing. This iterative process ensures that solutions are optimised before being
deployed

1.1.5. What are the 5 Stages of the Design Thinking Process

The five stages of design thinking, according to the d.school, are:

• Empathize: research your users' needs.

• Define: state your users' needs and problems.
• Ideate: challenge assumptions and create ideas.
• Prototype: start to create solutions.
• Test: try your solutions out.

1.1.6. Empathize: To create meaningful innovations, you need to know your users and care
about their lives.

WHAT is the Empathize mode?

Empathy is the center-piece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the
work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort
to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they
think about world, and what is meaningful to them.

WHY empathize
As a design thinker, the problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are those of
a particular group of people; in order to design for them, you must gain empathy for who they
are and what is important to them. Observing what people do and how they interact with their
environment gives you clues about what they think and feel. It also helps you learn about what
they need. By watching people, you can capture physical manifestations of their experiences –
what they do and say. This will allow you to infer the intangible meaning of those experiences
in order to uncover insights. These insights give you direction to create innovative solutions.
The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior. But learning to recognize
those insights is harder than you might think. Why? Because our minds automatically filter out
a lot of information without our even realizing it. We need to learn to see things “with a fresh
set of eyes,” and empathizing is what gives us those new eyes. Engaging with people directly
reveals a tremendous amount about the way they think and the values they hold. Sometimes
these thoughts and values are not obvious to the people who hold them, and a good conversation
can surprise both the designer and the subject by the unanticipated insights that are revealed.
The stories that people tell and the things that people say they do even if they are different from
what they actually do—are strong indicators of their deeply held beliefs about the way the
world is. Good designs are built on a solid understanding of these beliefs and values.

1.1.7. Define: “Framing the right problem is the only way to create the right solution”

The Define mode of the design process is all about bringing clarity and focus to the design
space. It is your chance, and responsibility, as a design thinker to define the challenge you are
taking on, based on what you have learned about your user and about the context. After
becoming an instant-expert on the subject and gaining invaluable empathy for the person you
are designing for, this stage is about making sense of the widespread information you have
gathered. The goal of the Define mode is to craft a meaningful and actionable problem
statement – this is what we call a point-of-view. This should be a guiding statement that focuses
on insights and needs of a particular user, or composite character. Insights don’t often just jump
in your lap; rather they emerge from a process of synthesizing information to discover
connections and patterns. In a word, the Define mode is sensemaking.

WHY define

The Define mode is critical to the design process because it results in your point-of-view
(POV): the explicit expression of the problem you are striving to address. More importantly,
your POV defines the RIGHT challenge to address, based on your new understanding of people
and the problem space. It may seem counterintuitive but crafting a more narrowly focused
problem statement tends to yield both greater quantity and higher quality solutions when you
are generating ideas. The Define mode is also an endeavor to synthesize your scattered findings
into powerful insights. It is this synthesis of your empathy work that gives you the advantage
that no one else has: discoveries that you can leverage to tackle the design challenge; that is,
INSIGHT.

1.1.8. Ideate: “It’s not about coming up with the ‘right’ idea, it’s about generating the
broadest range of possibilities.”
Ideate is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. Mentally
it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides
both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative
solutions into the hands of your users.

WHY ideate

You ideate in order to transition from identifying problems to creating solutions for your users.
Ideation is your chance to combine the understanding you have of the problem space and people
you are designing for with your imagination to generate solution concepts. Particularly early in
a design project, ideation is about pushing for a widest possible range of ideas from which you
can select, not simply finding a single, best solution. The determination of the best solution will
be discovered later, through user testing and feedback. Various forms of ideation are leveraged
to: - Step beyond obvious solutions and thus increase the innovation potential of your solution
set - Harness the collective perspectives and strengths of your teams - Uncover unexpected
areas of exploration - Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation
options - Get obvious solutions out of your heads, and drive your team beyond them.

1.1.9. Prototype: “Build to think and test to learn.”

The Prototype mode is the iterative generation of artifacts intended to answer questions that get
you closer to your final solution. In the early stages of a project that question may be broad –
such as “do my users enjoy cooking in a competitive manner?” In these early stages, you should
create low-resolution prototypes that are quick and cheap to make (think minutes and cents) but
can elicit useful feedback from users and colleagues. In later stages both your prototype and
question may get a little more refined. For example, you may create a later stage prototype for
the cooking project that aims to find out: “do my users enjoy cooking with voice commands or
visual commands”. A prototype can be anything that a user can interact with – be it a wall of
post-it notes, a gadget you put together, a role-playing activity, or even a storyboard. Ideally you
bias toward something a user can experience. Walking someone through a scenario with a
storyboard is good, but having them role-play through a physical environment that you have
created will likely bring out more emotions and responses from that person.

WHY prototype

To ideate and problem-solve. Build to think. To communicate. If a picture is worth a thousand

words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures. To start a conversation. Your interactions with
users are often richer when centered around a conversation piece. A prototype is an opportunity
to have another, directed conversation with a user. To fail quickly and cheaply. Committing as
few resources as possible to each idea means less time and money invested up front. To test
possibilities. Staying low-res allows you to pursue many different ideas without committing to a
direction too early on. To manage the solution-building process. Identifying a variable also
encourages you to break a large problem down into smaller, testable chunks.

1.1.10. Test: “Testing is an opportunity to learn about your solution and your
user”.

WHAT is the Test mode

The Test mode is when you solicit feedback, about the prototypes you have created, from your
users and have another opportunity to gain empathy for the people you are designing for.
Testing is another opportunity to understand your user, but unlike your initial empathy mode,
you have now likely done more framing of the problem and created prototypes to test. Both
these things tend to focus the interaction with users, but don’t reduce your “testing” work to
asking whether or not people like your solution. Instead, continue to ask “Why?”, and focus on
what you can learn about the person and the problem as well as your potential solutions. Ideally
you can test within a real context of the user’s life. For a physical object, ask people to take it
with them and use it within their normal routines. For an experience, try to create a scenario in a
location that would capture the real situation. If testing a prototype in situ is not possible, frame
a more realistic situation by having users take on a role or task when approaching your
prototype. A rule of thumb: always prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you
know you’re wrong—testing is the chance to refine your solutions and make them better.

WHY test

To refine prototypes and solutions. Testing informs the next iterations of prototypes. Sometimes
this means going back to the drawing board. To learn more about your user. Testing is another
opportunity to build empathy through observation and engagement—it often yields unexpected
insights. To refine your POV. Sometimes testing reveals that not only did you not get the
solution right, but also that you failed to frame the problem correctly.

1.1.11. User Journey Map:

What is a user journey map?
A user journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with a product or service to
achieve a specific goal. It outlines key stages, actions, emotions, and pain points throughout the
experience, helping businesses identify friction points and opportunities for improvement.
What is the difference between a user journey map and a customer journey map?
While often used interchangeably, a user journey map and a customer journey map differ in
scope:
 User journey map: Focuses on a specific interaction within a product or service—such
as signing up for a SaaS tool, navigating a mobile app, or completing a checkout
process.
  Customer journey map: Encompasses the entire relationship between a customer and a
brand over time, including marketing touchpoints, customer support interactions, and
long-term engagement.
What are the essential elements of a user journey map?
A well-structured user journey map helps businesses understand how users interact with their
product or service. To create an effective map, it’s important to include key elements that
provide actionable insights and highlight areas for improvement.
 User personas and their roles – Represent different audience segments based on goals,
behaviors, and challenges.
 Defining user scenarios and goals – Outline the specific situation and objectives a user
wants to achieve.
 Stages and phases of the user journey – Break the journey into steps like awareness,
consideration, decision, and retention.
 Key touchpoints and interaction channels – Identify where users interact with your
brand (e.g., website, app, email, social media).
 Actions, emotions, and pain points – Map out what users do, how they feel, and where
they face friction.
 Identifying opportunities for improvement – Highlight areas where the experience
can be optimized to reduce drop-offs and increase satisfaction.
How to create a user journey map: Step-by-step process
Creating a user journey map requires a structured approach to ensure it accurately represents
how users interact with your product or service. Follow these three key phases to develop a
journey map that delivers actionable insights and drives improvements.
Phase 1: Plan your user journey map
Step 1: Define the user persona and scenario
Start by selecting a specific user persona and the scenario you want to map. Are you tracking
how a new user signs up for your SaaS product? Or how an existing customer navigates a
feature upgrade?
🔹 Tip: Use real customer data management from Usermaven to understand behavioral patterns
and segment users accurately.
Step 2: Outline the key stages of the user experience
Break the journey into clear stages that reflect major milestones. Typical stages include:
 Awareness – Discovering your product
 Consideration – Evaluating solutions
 Decision – Signing up or making a purchase
  Onboarding – Learning how to use the product
 Retention – Continued engagement and loyalty
Each stage should highlight what the user is trying to achieve and what challenges they might
encounter.
Step 3: Identify key touchpoints and user actions
List the channels and interactions where users engage with your brand, such as:
 Website or mobile app navigation
 Social media ads or organic posts
 Customer support interactions
 Email campaigns or product tutorials
Phase 2: Build your user journey map
Step 4: Document user emotions and pain points
For each stage, consider how the user feels—are they confused, frustrated, or delighted?
Common pain points might include:
 A complex onboarding process
 Slow-loading pages
 Lack of clear pricing information
By mapping these emotions, you can pinpoint friction points and areas for improvement.
Step 5: Identify bottlenecks and drop-off points
Look for moments where users abandon the journey or experience friction. This could be a high
bounce rate on a pricing page or users failing to complete an onboarding flow.
🔹 Tip: Use Usermaven’s behavioral analytics to detect where users struggle in real-time. This
allows you to optimize problem areas efficiently.
Step 6: Add qualitative insights for deeper understanding
User journey mapping isn’t just about numbers—it’s about understanding real user behavior.
Supplement your data with:
 Survey responses
 Customer interviews
 Session recordings
These qualitative insights provide context to the numbers and reveal why users take certain
actions.
Phase 3: Validate and refine your user journey map
Step 7: Test the journey map with real users
Before finalizing your journey map, validate it by:
 Observing users interact with your product
 Running usability tests to confirm assumptions
 Analyzing heatmaps to track where users hesitate
Step 8: Gather feedback from stakeholders
User journey mapping should be a collaborative effort. Share your findings with product
managers, marketers, and customer support teams. Different perspectives help refine the
journey and uncover blind spots.
Step 9: Continuously improve and update the map
User behaviors evolve, so your journey map should too. Regularly update it based on:
 New product features
 Changing user expectations
 Latest analytics trends

1.2. Human-Centered Design

What is human-centered design?
Definition

Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach to design that places real people at the center of
problem-solving. At every phase of the design process, consideration of your customers and
their context comes first. This is a step above user-centered design, which tends to focus on the
way people use things, not their psychological and emotional needs.

A brief history of human-centered design

HCD as an approach to creative problem-solving is often traced back to the beginning of the
Stanford University design program in 1958. There, Professor John E. Arnold first proposed
that engineering design should be human-centered.

In the mid-1960s, design theorist Horst Rittel introduced the term “wicked problems” to
describe problems that are difficult to solve, such as homelessness and social injustice, because
they consist of requirements that are incomplete or contradictory. Also, solving one wicked
problem often reveals another.

Consequently, wicked problems require a problem-solving approach that is adaptable and

centered on human behavior. Thus, HCD emerged to fulfill this need and took off from there.

HCD isn’t just a method; it’s a mindset with people at its center. The process champions new
solutions that come from cultivating deep empathy and are built to suit human needs.

Why is human-centered design important?

When you cultivate empathy for your customers, as you do in HCD, you can think of products
that will really improve people’s lives. Also, you can follow your customers’ needs as they
evolve. This can open up new opportunities to diversify for you and to try new products for
them.

In addition, HCD gives the people you’re designing for the sense that they’re understood. Not
only can this increase customer loyalty, but because they’re part of the process that brought the
product to market, they’re likely to feel more invested in using it.

What are the 4 principles of human-centered design?

HCD has four principles:

1. Be people-centered

Whatever you create, focus on the people who use the product and their context. These are real
human beings with real needs, and your product is a tool to help them reach their goals more
efficiently.

2. Find the right problem

Don Norman, a user experience expert and co-founder of the Nielsen-Norman Group, says that
usually when people come to him with a problem, it’s not the right one. Instead, he’s
approached with symptoms of the problem. But he wants to solve the fundamental problem, the
one that will solve the root cause of all the other problems. Solving the fundamental problem is
the real goal that companies come to designers with. Otherwise the symptoms will continue to
come up.

3. Think of everything as a system

Always keep the big picture of the user journey in mind, even if you’re only working on a small
part of it. Don Norman observes that because optimization at the local level doesn’t mean
optimization for the global level, we should keep the whole experience in mind for a smoother
system.

4. Small and simple interventions

Don’t rush into big design solutions. Instead, do iterative work with simple interventions that
you can learn from. Slowly, your results will get better and bigger. Also,
continuously prototype and test your solutions to make sure they meet the needs of the people
you’re designing for.

What is the human-centered design process? The 6 phases of HCD

According to design firm IDEO, these are the six phases of the HCD process.

Phase 1: Observation

From the first phase we foster deep empathy with people. In this phase, our goal is to
understand the people we’re designing for by observing and learning about them. We’ll put our
assumptions aside and look at pain points and patterns of behaviour to understand how people
feel about a given product.

Phase 2: Ideation

Here you and your team will come up with ideas based on what you learned in the previous
phase. You’ll want to come up with as many ideas as you can. Even bad ideas can make it to the
table as they can always have the root of a good idea in it. Eventually your team’s ideas will
evolve in the right direction.
Phase 3: Rapid prototyping

In this phase, you’ll create a simple prototype that will give you something to test with your
users. This shouldn’t be a high fidelity prototype but one that has just enough of the idea that
people can understand and comment on it.

Phase 4: User feedback

Get your prototype in the hands of the people you’re designing for in this phase. This is the
most critical phase of the design process because, without feedback from people, you won’t
know if your solution needs to be adjusted and in which directions.

Phase 5: Iteration

In this phase, use the insights you’ve gained from users to fuel changes to your design. Iterate,
test, and iterate some more until your solution is fine-tuned and ready to be used.

Phase 6: Implementation

Here, your design is ready to be put into action and used in the real world. While the design
seems finished, though, keep in mind that design is never truly done. Keep learning, keep
iterating, and keep testing whenever possible to continue to improve the design.

Human-centered design vs. design thinking—what’s the difference?

HCD and design thinking are similar concepts. Some people even think of them as
synonymous. There are some key differences, though.

While design thinking is at the root of HCD, it zooms out to look at the problem with a larger
scope. That’s because design thinking involves designing solutions and products that are created
to solve a problem. With design thinking, you’ll empathize with customers’ needs before
coming up with solutions that can immediately be put into use.

HCD, on the other hand, wants to ensure that the product will enhance consumers’ lives. With
HCD, you’ll get to know the objectives of your customers to ensure you and your team are
creating products that will improve their lives, not just interest or amuse them.

Still the two methods do have their similarities. Empathy for people is at the heart of both HCD
and design thinking. Both methods are iterative and, since your user base is constantly evolving,
your designs will evolve too.
What are some examples of human-centered design?

Human centered approach problem is an approach of problem solving mostly used in design and
management sectors by defining human perspectives in all steps of problem solving.

1. Pull/Push Door:
 Problem Solution designed
 The design had interrupted human  The push part of the door does
brain cognitive Bias. not need handle.
 For brain seeing handle triggers an  Design a door with only in the
action to pull it. pull side of the door.
 In this case the push and pull part of  Leave the push side with a
the door are fitted with a handle, this creates plain pad.
confusion in brain.  People will push the door
automatically if they don’t see a handle

2. Kids Toothbrush:
Kids hold tooth brushes is totally different from an adult. so it is harder for them to use a
toothbrush that are designer for adults.
 Tooth brush for adult

Problem Solution designed

 Kids hands are so small  Made the hands of brush fat and
 They hold tooth brush inside their fist. squishy
Adults hold it inside the fingers  Introduced small bristles
 Lack of motivation to brush their teeth  Introduced funny character to the
handle
 Created funny accessories

Designed by IDEO for Oral-B

3. Portable Music player –I pod Shuffle

 Portable music players are introduced in 1997 from that time manufacturers
tried to include more and more functionalities of music players. This result in abandoning the
user experience of these devices.
 Too much of functionalities and complicated design. The control buttons are
too close and accessibility was an issue. Most people use portable music player when they are
outside (jogging ,gym, gardening etc) .and it was difficult to hold it during activities
 Problem Solution designed
 Inaccessible buttons  Simple and accessible buttons
 Too much features and increased  Comes with a clip
complexity  Reduced complexity with sleek design
 Difficulty in carrying it

Designed by Apple Inc

.
4. Ketchup bottle:
 Getting full ketchup out of a ketchup bottle was a pain task. The ketchup was thick and it takes more
time to squeeze out till the last drop from that bottle and that’s why HEINZ introduced an inverted bottle design.
 HEINZ purchased the inverted bottle design from an American designer named Paul Brown. They
redesigned the bottle to have a handgrip and holding space .because of its inverted design , the user will get the last
drop from the bottle
 Problem Solution designed
 Difficulty in getting full ketchup out of  Designed inverted standing bottle
the bottle  Designed bottle for easy handling
 Difficulty in handling and squeezing with one hand
the bottle with one hand

Designed by Paul Brown for HEINZ

5. Lay’s Stax packaging

 The famous snack and beverage Brand PepsiCo introduce a new type of packaging
for lays.
  PepsiCo previous CEO Indra Nooyi Introduced the human centered design approach in
lays
 PepsiCo’s design team analyzed how people are using their products, and they find
out most of the women prefer to eat neat and clean.
 They want to have last chip in that packet but they are not ready to dump all that small
cracked chip into their mouth
 Solution is created a vertical and round bottom can with tray, so the user can take out the
tray whenever they need a snack and put it back in after use

.
Problem Solution designed
 Normal package can’t be reused  Designed around pillar package
 Product wastage is high  Introduce a tray for easy access
 Snack size was reduced .so user can
finish it in two bites

Winning Companies Use Human-Centered Design:

Kellogg’s Corn Flakes

Human centered Design has been around since the 1800’s. In 1894, Kellogg Cereal was invented
as a more digestible breakfast alternative for hospital patients. In seeing how they struggled to
east toast, Kellogg boiled wheat and rolled the dried flakes to make cereal the patients could eat
more easily. He then tried this technique with corn and observed how the patients ate the corn.
This became today what know Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

This focus on observing human interactions with empathy for their needs is putting the customer
at the hub and why human centered design is so valuable to a product’s or service’s success.

Uvex:

Uvex wanted Altitude to Create a new generation of protective safety eyewear. By incorporating
user centered design in their approach to learn what user really want, they were able to design fit
logic safety Eyewear , an innovate product design that combines comfortable fit, functionality,
and style and subsequently generated high sales for Uvex.

Colgate (Electrical Toothbrushes):

Colgate Hired Altitude to restore their leadership position in electronic

toothbrushes. Innovation Strategery and research team determined that users
wanted a better fitting, more effective, longer lasting, and easier to maintain
toothbrush. They develop the motion, a high-powered, slim profile brush, with
dual oppositional oscillating heads and a patented ergonomically correct
arcing neck
Key takeaways

That’s human-centered design in a nutshell. To summarise: human-centered design (HCD) puts

real people at the center of any design solution. It emerged as an approach to problem-solving,
encouraging designers to cultivate empathy and define the root problem before seeking
solutions.

1.3. Product Market Dynamics

Product Market Dynamics: Understanding the Basics

What is Product Market Dynamics?

Product market dynamics is the interplay between a product and its market environment,
focusing on customer needs, market competition, demand fluctuations, and evolving trends. In
the context of traditional crafts, it is important to understand the customers' cultural preferences,
sustainability concerns, and the demand for handmade products.

Key Aspects:
o Customer Needs: Understanding the specific needs of the target market,
including what drives their purchasing decisions, such as quality, uniqueness,
sustainability, and cultural relevance.
o Competition: Identifying competitors in the market, both local and global, who
offer similar products (e.g., other traditional or handmade craft businesses).
o Demand and Trends: Recognizing shifts in consumer preferences, like the
growing demand for eco-friendly, handmade, and culturally rich products.
o Price Sensitivity: Assessing what price point consumers are willing to pay for
traditional craft products, keeping in mind the handmade nature, quality, and
cultural value of the products.

Traditional Crafts as a Business Product

What Makes Traditional Crafts a Product Worth Solving? Traditional crafts represent both
cultural heritage and sustainable, authentic production methods. These products address various
modern consumer needs, such as:

o Cultural Significance: Consumers today are seeking ways to reconnect with

cultural traditions and heritage through products that tell a story.
o Sustainability: As awareness of environmental issues grows, traditional crafts
often offer more sustainable alternatives to mass-produced goods.
o Unique & Personalized Offerings: Handmade, custom-designed items provide
individuality and authenticity, which are highly valued by consumers today.

Examples of Traditional Crafts:

o Handwoven Textiles: Fabrics like Ikat, Kanjivaram, or Khadi which carry

regional cultural significance.
 o Pottery: Handcrafted ceramics, often with unique designs that represent regional
heritage.
o Wooden Sculptures & Art: Traditional wooden carvings and sculptures that
reflect local customs and art forms.
o Embroidery & Handicrafts: Detailed, hand-stitched designs on textiles and
other mediums, showcasing craftsmanship and tradition.

Applying Product Market Dynamics to Traditional Crafts

To develop a business in traditional crafts, understanding the product market dynamics is

crucial. Here's how to apply it:

 Step 1: Identify Market Need

o Recognize the growing demand for authentic, handcrafted, and culturally
significant products. This could involve conducting surveys, market research,
or studying current consumer behaviors.
o Identify sustainability-conscious consumers, especially in markets that
prioritize eco-friendly, artisanal products.
 Step 2: Define a Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
o Traditional crafts should be positioned as high-quality, one-of-a-kind items
with a rich history and cultural value. A strong UVP could emphasize the
heritage, sustainability, and personalization aspects of the products.
o Example: A business could market itself as a premium brand offering
authentic handwoven textiles from a specific region, promoting cultural
preservation while providing customers with unique, sustainable goods.
 Step 3: Conduct Market Research
o Understand who the target customers are. This could include segments such as
eco-conscious buyers, cultural enthusiasts, and high-income consumers who
are willing to invest in high-quality traditional products.
o Analyze competitors to identify market gaps. For example, is there a lack of
representation of certain types of traditional crafts in the market?
 Step 4: Understand Customer Behavior and Trends
o Look at customer preferences for online shopping or offline, and how they prefer
to buy products (direct from artisans, through craft fairs, online marketplaces,
etc.).
o Study social media trends that highlight sustainability, handmade products, and
cultural preservation, as these can greatly influence consumer decisions.

4. Business Model for Traditional Crafts

 Business Plan:
Create a clear business plan that outlines your business goals, vision, and mission.
Define how your business will make money, what your sales channels will be, and your
marketing strategy. A traditional craft business might have an e-commerce platform,
sales at local markets or craft fairs, and even partnerships with fashion designers or
luxury brands.
  Brand Identity:
Developing a strong brand that resonates with the values of craftsmanship,
sustainability, and cultural richness is vital. The storytelling aspect is important in
traditional crafts — sharing the artisans' stories, the craft’s history, and the production
process can engage customers and help build emotional connections to the product.
 Distribution Channels:
A successful business model would likely include multiple channels for reaching
customers:
o E-commerce: Platforms like Etsy, Amazon Handmade, or a custom-built website
to showcase products.
o Physical Retail: Local craft stores, markets, and partnerships with boutique
stores that sell artisanal products.
o Collaborations: Collaborating with designers or larger fashion brands to
incorporate traditional crafts into mainstream products.

Key Challenges and Solutions for Traditional Crafts Businesses

 Challenge 1: Lack of Awareness

Many consumers may not be aware of the cultural significance or the quality of
traditional crafts.
o Solution: Launch awareness campaigns that educate consumers on the
importance of cultural preservation and the value of buying handmade,
sustainable products. Utilize social media to create engaging content that
highlights the artisans, their stories, and the unique processes involved in
creating traditional crafts.
 Challenge 2: Scaling Production
Producing traditional crafts at a large scale can be difficult due to the manual labor and
time-intensive processes involved.
o Solution: Partner with local artisans and craftspeople, ensuring small-scale
production is maintained while still meeting market demands. Focus on quality
over quantity and maintain exclusivity.
 Challenge 3: Pricing & Competition
Traditional craft products may be perceived as too expensive, especially compared to
mass-produced goods.
o Solution: Focus on quality, uniqueness, and story to justify the higher price
point. Offer tiered pricing for different markets, and consider offering
customized or limited-edition products that carry higher value.

Conclusion: The Future of Traditional Crafts Businesses

 The potential for a successful traditional crafts business lies in creating meaningful
products that cater to modern consumer values like sustainability, cultural
preservation, and uniqueness.
 By understanding product market dynamics, businesses can navigate challenges, identify
opportunities, and create products that resonate with a wide range of consumers.
 Traditional crafts have the unique potential to bridge cultural gaps, promote
sustainability, and offer high-quality products that appeal to conscious consumers.