WORKMAN Plus: changing the customer, not the product (2018)

Change how you sell and to whom, not what you sell

The core of this decision is that it did not develop a new product but re-delivered an existing strength to a different customer. The high performance and low price Workman had honed for tradespeople were of a standard that would work for general and outdoor customers too, yet they were buried inside a workwear shop and an unpolished way of showing goods. Tsuchiya Tetsuo’s data analysis identified the empty market into which that strength would land as it was. Change nothing about the product; change only where it sits and how it looks. This idea — opening a large market at low cost — was the result of rediscovering, through data, the value of assets Workman already held.

What WORKMAN Plus shows is that a growth ceiling does not necessarily mean the limit of product strength. What was saturated was the workwear market, not Workman’s goods. Load the same product onto a different market, a different customer, a different presentation, and growth continues. That discovery led on to #Workman Joshi and turned Workman from a workwear company into a maker of functional clothing for the general public. Correctly distinguishing what has saturated — seeing strength and market as separable — was the starting point of this shift in customer base.