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A product idea can sound crystal clear right up until somebody starts pulling at the edges of it.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with new founders recently, and there’s a pattern emerging. They have an idea, often based on a very real problem they’ve experienced themselves or seen in the market. They know they want to make a bra, or swimwear, or sleepwear, and they’re ready to start turning that idea into something tangible.
Then we start digging into it. Who is the customer really? What problem are we prioritising? What does the product need to be known for? Suddenly the apparently clear idea becomes a little less clear.
That’s not a criticism. This is exactly what the early stages are for. An idea is supposed to be questioned, pulled apart and challenged before you start spending serious money trying to manufacture it.
And while those questions can sound simple written down, the difficult bit isn’t asking them. It’s working out what the answers actually mean, where they contradict each other, which assumptions need challenging and what all of that means for the product itself.
Sometimes a founder has a very clear understanding of the problem, but the product that should solve it is still fuzzy. Other times the product itself is already quite defined, but once we start looking at the customer, it becomes harder to explain why she needs this particular version of it.
Then there are the products expected to solve absolutely everything. Supportive, soft, seamless, lightweight, invisible, adjustable, beautiful, easy to get on, suitable for multiple body types and ideally involving approximately no compromise whatsoever.
Wouldn’t that be nice.
The difficulty is that product decisions pull against each other. More structure can affect softness. More adjustability can affect appearance. A particular silhouette can limit the construction options available to achieve support. A fabric chosen because it drapes beautifully may be completely at odds with what you’re asking it to do technically.
None of that automatically makes the idea bad. It simply means someone has to decide what matters most, because if everything is the priority, nothing really is.
I also think founders can sometimes be too quick to abandon the difficult bit.
You come up with something genuinely distinctive, then start speaking to suppliers or manufacturers and discover that it’s harder to make than expected. Maybe the construction is challenging, the materials are unusual or the first factory you approach doesn’t immediately know how to make it. Suddenly there’s pressure to simplify the idea.
Sometimes that’s absolutely the right commercial decision. Some concepts simply aren’t sensible once you understand what they would cost or what production would involve.
But “difficult” and “wrong” aren’t the same thing.
If the thing you’re removing is the reason the product needs to exist in the first place, I want to understand that decision very carefully before we simplify the concept into something that already exists.
There’s no prize for creating a technically achievable product that nobody particularly needs. Equally, there’s no prize for protecting a clever idea at all costs if the customer doesn’t value it enough to pay for it.
That middle ground is where the real work is.
Product development will always teach you things. A sketch becomes a pattern, the pattern becomes a sample, the sample goes onto a body, and suddenly you can see things that were impossible to know beforehand.
Designs evolve. Materials behave differently from expectations. Something that looked perfect on paper might need to change completely once you start fitting it. That’s normal, and honestly, it’s part of what makes product development interesting.
What I’m less comfortable with is using sampling to answer questions we could have resolved before we started.
If the product hasn’t been defined clearly enough, it becomes very difficult to judge whether the sample is actually successful. Feedback starts becoming vague. Maybe it needs more support. Maybe it needs to feel more premium. Maybe it doesn’t feel distinctive enough.
But compared with what? For whom? Which of those things matters most?
At that point the sample has become a very expensive brainstorming tool.
I’d much rather do more thinking before somebody has ordered fabric, created a pattern and sewn a garment. Not because every answer needs to be fixed forever, but because the sample should be helping us develop the product, not helping us discover what the product was supposed to be.
There’s a danger of taking this too far and believing everything needs to be perfectly resolved before technical development begins. It won’t be.
Product development is iterative by nature, and some questions genuinely can only be answered by making something. What a clear strategy gives you is a way to judge the decisions that come next.
If the factory suggests changing the construction, you have something to measure that decision against. If the cost comes in too high, you know which parts of the concept are worth protecting. If the fit isn’t working, you have a clearer sense of what the intended experience was supposed to be before you start changing everything around it.
That doesn’t make development rigid. If anything, it gives you more confidence when the inevitable compromises start appearing, because you know which parts of the idea you’re prepared to move and which ones really matter.
A lot of my recent conversations with founders have reminded me how much product development happens before there’s anything technical to document.
Someone might come to me ready to talk about CADs, Tech Packs, patterns and sampling, but once we start talking properly about the idea, it becomes clear there are still some bigger decisions sitting underneath it.
That doesn’t mean the idea isn’t ready enough, or that the founder should disappear for six months and come back with a perfectly formed business plan. That’s not realistic, and frankly, if they already had all the answers they probably wouldn’t need me.
It means we spend some time working through the product before we start committing money to making it. What is actually worth protecting in this idea? Where are the contradictions? Which parts are essential to what makes it different, and which parts can flex when cost, fit or manufacturing reality inevitably gets involved?
Because they will get involved. The fabric won’t behave exactly as imagined. The construction may be harder than expected. The factory might suggest another route. The cost might force a rethink.
That’s normal product development.
What makes those decisions easier is having enough clarity around the product to know what you’re trying to protect when those compromises appear.
And I think that’s the bit that’s been reinforced for me lately. Before a product needs a drawing, a pattern or a sample, it needs enough clarity to hold together when the real-world compromises start arriving.
If the idea can survive that pressure, then you’ve got something worth developing.
