On January 23rd, second-year students in the Bachelor of Fashion Marketing program at our Paris Campus kicked off our industry collaboration with The Future of Walking, a London-based startup focused on activity-based air purification. Their headline product, an air-filtering shoe that aims to reverse the damage of air pollution through micro-contributions.
TFW x IFA Paris Collaboration
The TFW x IFA Paris Innovation Challenge Day, a mini-hackathon featured a full day’s worth of concept brainstorming from ideation of the user journey through to product visualisation. The day was the launch of a four-month collaboration with the goal of developing a commercially viable range of sneakers that uses the in-built air filtration system.
TFW x IFA Paris Collaboration
Working in teams of five, students kicked off the Innovation Challenge Day by distilling the potential target market, for whom they charted unique customer journeys from product discovery through to purchase conversion. The insights extracted informed the selection of product features that the students included in their sneaker concept proposals. Working with samples of sustainable materials sponsored by Material Driven, students visualised and modelled shoe concepts that explored the future of footwear. The teams also proposed unique business models for getting the shoes to market, consumer psychology, technology affinity, social awareness and brand partnerships.
In their closing remarks, the TFW team commended the diversity and practicality of the ideas put forward by the teams, offering specific feedback on how to push innovation further within the project. Through this project, students will gain a first-hand experience of innovation design, product development and business strategy, while appreciating the complexity and challenges involved with creating sustainable fashion technology products.
To learn more about the program and our fashion technology programs, please visit these links: MBA Fashion Technology & Short Course Future Fashion Tech
A big thank you to TFW founders Sam Cryer, Yoo-Jin Jung, Ines Marques, Umar Hossain and Sabina Weiss for such a great project!
