HUNGRY TIGER
A Flying Tiger and UAL collaborative project.
Project Scope
This project aimed to create a new themed product collection for Flying Tiger’s kid’s costume section. This is an official collaborative project between Flying Tiger and UAL.
Team
Anna
Eloise
Emily
JuYoung
Sarah
Yonsoo
Tools
Excel
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Timeline
January- April, 2022
Hungry Tiger -Cooking With Kids
Project Overview
As put by FTC, “real value lies not in the products we own, but in the experiences we share.” (FTC, 2022). With this mission in mind, Hungry Tiger allows children to engage with their parents, friends, and family to learn cooking skills through our bright, practical and affordable assortment whilst having fun and making real memories together.
Based on a plethora of primary and secondary research, our food theme, which draws on two of WGSN’s key themes for AW22/23 in Childrenswear - Kid’s Cafe, takes a playful take on mealtimes, emphasizing the educational possibilities of making and sharing recipes (Kragg, 2022), all while dressing up as their favorite foods – putting the concept of “imaginary open minds” into action!
“Kids with imaginary open minds- playing free!”
2D Visual Range Plan
Market Research
The pandemic brought a negative impact on childrenswear during 2020 and 2021. At the same time, consumer spending on childrenswear has dropped by 16% in 2020 to £6 billion from £7.1 billion in 2019. As a result, while people still show a preference for buying childrenswear in-store, almost three-quarters (73%) of shoppers purchased childrenswear online in the last 12 months. COVID-19 has accentuated the shift towards shopping online, with 31% of shoppers having bought more childrenswear online since the start of the pandemic. This indicates the importance of online channels and marketing with social media, which justifies and supports our marketing strategy.
The chart indicates that comfort and children’s preference are considered the most before making a purchase of childrenswear. This information has been taken onboard as four sets of our costumes included in the capsule collection are without buckles allowing flexible and comfortable wear for kids. It is also notable that as Gen Z and Millenials are moving to parenthood, consumers are also moving away from gender stereotypes.
SWOT Analysis
Through external and internal analysis, FTC will be able to identify the brand strength and market opportunities while being conscious of brand limitations of, weaknesses, and threats. FTC should plan and develop its approach by recognizing the appropriate status quo.
📌Strengths
As Millennials, the creative directors, and core consumers start to have kids themselves have a become the parents, BOF (2021) have highlighted the positive market position Childrenswear is located in, signaling growing area of demand that collection will be able to supply to.
Prices point has affordability to consumers compared to competitors
As a global brand, FTC is operated in 26 countries with around 900stores.
Since WGSN (2021) have highlighted the importance of making globally appealing themes, FTC has already focused on the prevalence of versatility across brand offering, with the lack of variation in products.
According to Euromonitor, the childrenswear market is currently worth $1.4million
📌Weaknesses
Lack of product diversity, heavily focused on accessories rather than childrenswear or costumes (Product range mix, 2022).
FTC has relied heavily on a wide range of offline networks resulting in a loss of revenue during the pandemic. The group store network had been reduced to 850 outlets by the end of 2020 (Retail week, 2021)
📌Opportunities
Contain quilting, heavy pile fleece textiles, and dreamy, imaginative pattern in ranges that are on a trend for kidswear AW 22/23. (WGSN, 2022)
Increase the number of collections that contains the color pink (8%), yellow (0%), and Orange (0%) to diversify color ranges for kidswear.
Place price ranges for children’s costumes between £1-£15 based on the customer survey of parents’ preference. (Appendix)
Continuing sustainable investing can be a great appeal to conscious consumer millennials. (Accenture, 2020)
📌Threats
Flying Tiger loses brand loyalty regarding kidswear in comparison with Disney and Primark, that has a higher market share (Retail week, 2018)
The apparel market, along with the children's wear market, witnessed a significant decline of 28% in the global market due to the closure of factories and retailing sectors caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (Mintel & Mordor Intelligence).
Due to the fear of Covid 19 transmission by parents and cancellation of public events, has resulted in a decrease in costume demand by 6% in the past two years (Statista)
Macro Environment:
PESTLE Analysis
Micro Environment
Consumer Research
The purpose of this research is to identify the appropriate target consumer's preferences, lifestyle, affordability to merchandise the whole concept and strategy of Flying Tiger
The primary research was conducted through surveys and short interviews. All participants were parents with children visiting Flying Tiger in
6 different stores in London. Most of their children were composed of aged 8- 11 years old.
Mintel (2018) states that price, quality, style, and convenience are the key factors that drive consumers to purchase the product. The interview and survey results reveal the parent’s clear purpose in buying costumes for kids and the importance of how the taste of kids should also be considered in creating ranges.
Primary Consumer Research
How much are you willing to spend for kids costume?
The survey was conducted based on a total of 19 participants who visited a total of six different Flying Tiger branches in London. A total of nine elements were asked in the survey, including basic to detailed questions. According to the survey's in-depth analysis, most of the customers who visited the store were women (89%), and the main age group was 30-35 years (37%). Many of the customers work in the business (32%) and technical (21%). As for the brand, the biggest reason for shopping at Flying Tiger was the low price range (29%) and the diverse product ranges (24%), with 47% of consumers saying they are willing to buy costume products for around £11-15. Meanwhile, 37% of consumers mentioned they usually care about sustainability when shopping, while 26% of other consumers are trying to care as much as possible.
Why do you shop at Flying Tiger?
Competitor Analysis
For competitor analysis, we have investigated in H&M, Primark, TU, and Aldi’s kids costume section.
Based on popular products selected by each competitor's online website (Figure.5), the average price range of products is around £10-16. Through this analysis, competitors that correspond to clothing brands have quite a variety of costume products, except for Primark. On the other hand, Flying Tiger, which is based on other forms of general merchandise retail, tends to focus more on products such as costume accessories than clothing. In the case of product quality and detail, Disney, with the highest retail price, was relatively high while Primark, which has the lowest proportion of costume clothing, was relatively low in quality with a low price point. Meanwhile, most competitor brands, including Flying Tiger, used bright colors, mainly red and blue, as key colors, while the use of monotonous colors, such as black and grey, was low. It could be seen that all brands used polyester as the main fabric material used in the product, and additional materials were used only in the case of Tu, H&m, and Disney, which have high retail prices.
Trend Research
Researching into Kids wear trends, in aspect of color, prints, textile, shape and theme.
📌Colors
AW22/23 focuses on sustainably achieved tones, less neon, and more pastel as an offshoot from lockdown attitudes to sustainability changing. More digitally charged shades, such as Orchid, provide a seasonless appeal (Rechner, 2020). This translates into a more classic, muted array, adding a softer edge to the primary palette, and increasing wearability day-to-day as well as costume wear.
📌Prints
An overall focus on happy, optimistic messages. Back to School is a key theme, with dreamy, imaginative prints such as Space and Ice Explorer. Adventure nostalgia is reflected across the board, as well as in our assortment with the inclusion of B/W checks – increasing again in popularity at 4% of the print mix in the UK (+1ppt), 4% in the US, and 2% in Germany. (Lowe, 2021).
📌Textiles
Fabrics display a huge shift to sustainability and circularity across the whole season’s assortment, with the importance of soft-focus fabrics remaining from the fallout of nationwide lockdowns. This has been translated into our assortment with felting and jersey inclusion. Recycled cotton is also key, increasing once more in popularity, reflected alongside vintage knit within Hungry Tiger – “Hairy, felted textures have a cozy #slounge appeal that updates #homehub simplicity.” (Goodfellow-Ash 2021.)
📌Shapes
Focusing on the CIFF tradeshow, cross-seasonality is apparent, with the value of soft fleeces emphasize alongside outdoor utility and coordinating sets – “perennial” for Boyswear especially (Goodfellow-Ash, 2022). Subsequently, relaxed pants, sets and soft-focus silhouettes have been illustrated across the collection with their gender-neutral, versatile styling appeal.
📌Theme
Frugality, technological expansion, and community are promoted as key for 2023-24, frequently appearing as macro-influencers of trends and society. The inclusion of cooking and creativity into our dress-up collection conveys this message of wellbeing, as well as a change to come together post-pandemic. "Kids Cafe" is a prime example of the season and the ultimate inspiration for Hungry Tiger; “The concept: make food fun again with a collection that sees kids controlling the menu.” (Kragg, 2022).
Range Alignment
To implement this into Hungry Tiger, each piece available connects with similar options in the collection to form product narrative groups, as well as with products in FTC’s existing assortment, to create cross-selling opportunities.
By encouraging complementary sales, the fragmented stock becomes less of a risk as these items can be merchandised outside the range, when the collection itself begins to sell out and look less appealing. Saleability out of season is possible, reducing the terminal stock issues and overall potential losses of profit.
Each narrative links directly to findings from our primary and secondary research, with relevance, and is provided directly alongside consumer demands. Products serve a functional purpose, as well as being colorful and engaging.
“When developing products, it is key to make sure that they incorporate the right level of fashionability in order to uphold the market position.”
Price Hierachy
With Hungry Tiger comprising a fancy-dress collection, all options rank high risk, being less versatile and wearable than regular daywear. As a result, options can instead be grouped into a Selling Price Hierarchy. FTC places importance on the value of inclusivity, so the collection ensures that every budget has a range of choices. This cost- initiative is relative to FTC’s company history, where all goods used to be the same price, titling the brand; “The Danish word for a ten-kroner coin is pronounced tee’-yuh, which sounds just like the Danish word for tiger.” (FTC, 2022) – reflecting pricing attribute FTC has previously offered in their assortments.
Opportunities from the Market Research, such as PESTLE analysis, such as the pandemic increasing cooking with kids, as well as customer profiling to investigate the global consumer of FTC, have shaped Hungry Tiger: a creative, value-packed range featuring a wide array of cultures and tastes. The collection is an amalgamation of WGSN trend research, comp shop findings as well as investigation of the existing assortment, with “Butter” and “Sweet Coral” the top colors at 30% and 20% of the overall assortment.
GBB Logic
The ranking is influenced by selling price alone, with Good <£10, Better = £10, and Best >£10, with FTC priding themselves on accessibility for all price points – this assortment ensures the inclusion of many lower-cost alongside higher-priced options, with value attributable to each piece of the collection, and Better and Best options holding higher cost prices.
Where the Velcro Pizza set is interactive for the wearer to change toppings themselves, lower-cost options such as chopsticks can also be used in action to eat recipes cooked with. Alongside this, each choice is equipped with a recipe card, providing the promise of a memorable bonding experience, education, and the garment/ accessory itself. This also builds a seasonless appeal to the collection.
Ethical & Sustainable Considerations
Whilst considering our range, we are enforcing many of Flying Tiger Copenhagen's ethical values. For example, we focus on the three pillars: products, operations, and people. Focusing on circular materials and packaging.
Our responsible sourcing allows us to ensure we focus on human and labor rights and the impacts our production has on the workers and individuals in these areas. This includes treating each worker with respect and providing a fair and safe working environment.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
According to Kowalewicz (2020), to attract Gen Y consumers, an all-digital approach is best for this generation, since they use YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, Tiktok as their primary social media platforms, especially as they use social media to conduct product research before making a buying decision.
#showmeyourmess
To introduce our product to our target audience and build a close community, starting the #showmeyourmess hashtag to spread awareness among the community is planned. As the unique selling point of this collection is cooking with kids. However, we deeply understand that the process can be messy and out of control, and it is not as aesthetically pleasing as we usually see on Instagram and Pinterest. Hence, we would like to use this hashtag to gather parents with actually relatable content.
Engaging online and offline experience
To merge the online and offline experience, we would add a QR code tag to each product, and the tag would link to our social media page, showing the #showmeyourmess hashtag page to create a stronger bond with Flying Tiger's customer community.
TikTok Challenge
According to Alice Delahunt, the chief digital officer of Ralph Lauren, "Instagram is for beautiful, stylized photos while TikTok is fun, viral content." (Lieber, 2020) Therefore, to cater to this platform, a TikTok challenge of recreating the included recipes is launched, especially for our hero pieces. Combining the #showmeyourmess theme, we are expecting to create a fun and viral challenge to raise product and brand awareness.
Key Performance Indicators
Conclusion
Through an in-depth study into current macro factors affecting the UK and European Kidswear, competitor offers, consumer preferences, and product trends, Hungry Tiger has been produced – shaped directly from primary and secondary research findings.
FTC’s existing assortment displays a zest for fun and creativity. Our surveys showed parents’ love of the quick, easy shopping experience was apparent. FTC’s assignment brief provided a precise aim to deliver to the “Mom with style who wants value for money.” Information from WGSN and a range audit showed Food/Cuisine as a growing area untouched within the existing assortment. Findings from the Comp shop highlighted that the current dress-up offering lacked in Blacks and pink, with room for more Gender-neutral styles. In summary, the collection aims to “marry creativity with value,” once again referencing FTC’s mission statement (FTC, 2022) – by shrewdly highlighting a gap in the Kidswear market and, within this, designing a custom-fit range that encapsulated affordability, inclusivity, and education, with a digital update, bringing FTC back to the focus of the TikTok generation. Additionally, the prices in the range have focused on providing multiple ultra-low cost options, a response to the rising fuel crisis set to impact UK homes this year (Sky News, 2022).
An OTB of £368,640 and an intake margin of 68.8% was achieved through merchandising the 'Hungry Tiger' range. February and early March will see a peak in sales, and then clearance will begin in week 9 with the hopes of achieving a terminal stock balance of £11,385.20
Recommendations
Moving on from AW22/23, key elements of the collection can be extended into new concepts whilst still producing value with the fun element that Hungry Tiger has introduced. Action-from-purchase opportunities, such as the recipe cards included with styles easily adapted, creating the chance for further ranges and revenue, alongside stronger relationships with customers as FTC becomes more than just a pop-in experience – a key limitation as highlighted with customer surveys (Appendix 2).
Limitations around range creation have included a shorter timescale in procuring both primary and secondary research – particularly with customer insights and in-store surveys. Had the timescale spanned further, results may have provided a closer insight which may have impacted our range design. FTC has also been left with a reputation as an unsustainable store in some cases due to the availability of low-cost, plastic goods, as seen with survey responses reporting that shopping ethically is “difficult in niche areas ie costumes.” As a response, Hungry Tiger utilizes many recycled plastics and cotton to offset consumers’ concerns for sustainability whilst upholding the inclusive pricing structure key to the brand.
