The Importance of Ethnic Diversity in Product Lines

Diversity and inclusion in product design

Designing new products takes time, even without variations in choice, so it's all too easy to focus on one ethnicity to represent. It came into our consciousness recently as a small business that we could be doing more to create a real choice for our customers.

When designing a woman in a yoga pose for our Namas-Tea range, we agreed on four customisations, combining to create 240 unique variations was a good start. With 4 base models of different ethnicities, 3 hair styles for each, 5 different hair colours and 4 outfit choices, categorising each of these choices meant developing a careful system of avoid mistakes in production.

To our delight, in the first week of sales we had sold products covering three of the different ethnic models, confirming to us that we were on the right path to giving people what they were looking for. As the choices were being broadly utilized, I decided to add the option of bespoke models, hairstyles, hair colour and outfits. Putting ourselves in our customers' shoes has been the best thing we've done and we aim to continue this going forward. Other enhancements to the choices we offer will be male models and other choices based on the demand of the customers whose opinion we care about greatly. Other examples may include if a customer has a disability, physical variation (such as an amputation) or an LGBTQ+ representation that they would like reflected in a bespoke design, we can add this to the variations going forward.

No company can do this all perfectly right away, but at Loop the Loop Designs we're trying to be the most inclusive we can be and we will always listen to the people who we do this for, the people who will be sitting down having a nice cuppa in a mug that represents them as closely as possible.

Author: Daniel Tee