The second design project of MITidm core is a holiday season tradition, where we form teams of three and and are tasked with the following:
Wanting to come up with something unique and functional, my team and I decided to design and build our take on a wine aerator. We wanted to create a product that would be really giftable given the coming holiday period, yet novel relative to products in past years. In addition to taking part in the small batch manufacturing process, I drove research, brand strategy, and some go-to-market activities for this venture.
Before we even arrived at the wine aerator concept, we wanted to get a sense of what characteristics people valued in gifts and other specialty products at a high level. We gathered that at the very least, our product should be one that:
With this in mind, I led a second round of interviews to build our target persona for our product. I wanted us to get a sense of peoples’ current habits and experiences around wine consumption, and then use this information for the design of both the product and the brand. In summary, our target customer was someone who, while considering themselves a wine enthusiast, finds the concept of aeration unclear overall. This persona typically associates aeration with drinking more expensive wines, which they usually don’t consume often. The social aspect of the wine experience and its value to this persona was also something that was observed and, though implicit, was something that also influenced our design direction.
In coming up with the identity that we wanted to communicate when selling the product, I focused on the opportunities to open up the idea of wine aeration beyond the typical associations our target persona made. I also wanted to touch on the social aspect of wine drinking and emphasize how our overall aesthetic differed greatly from current products in market.
We positioned ourselves as a brand that would be educational, self-aware, and design forward. I aimed for us to bring clarity to what wine aeration is (to bring more people in) and how it was something that our target persona could appreciate more often than they originally thought. I also wanted to lean into our difference relative to what’s out there already: from the actual design of the product, to the fact that all of the units are handmade, to us being MIT students playing in an unexpected space. This last point of difference was the reason why I approached our communication with a sense of self-awareness and a tone that was more peer-like versus talking down to them in a traditional 'educational' fashion. Also during interviews, our story and background was mentioned as something that made the concept feel special and unique, which only reinforced our decision to lean into that and increase the percieved value of our aerator.
Within a week of the Sales Gala, we launched our website and Instagram page, shared content about our story, the design and manufacturing process, and enabled people to pre-order a unit out of the set of 50. We paired this with an in-person activation that included live product demos and wine tasting to further demonstrate the functionality of our product and build consumer trust (added benefit: I'm now licensed to serve alcohol in the state of Massachusetts due to the regulatory training I had to take prior).
Ultimately, we sold all 50 aerators of the collection by the day of launch - with sales coming from across the country and demand being there for a second batch to this day. A link to our Instagram page that’s still up can be found here
