Lovesac
Retail Service Design
Company: Prophet
Client: Lovesac
My role: Creative Director
• Creative direction
• Service offering ideation
• Stimuli design
• Experience testing
The TLDR
I led the service concepting and testing stimuli development for Lovesac’s first closed-loop sustainability initiative, identifying high-impact reuse, resale, and recycling programs for their “pre-loved” Sactional products.
I led designers and strategists in creating four distinct "Circle to Consumer" (CTC) service concepts, extending the lifecycle of Sactional products through trade-ins, upgrades, and reclamation.
We supported Lovesac in conducting qualitative and quantitative testing with both current and prospective customers to assess comprehension, appeal, and brand impact, using illustrated storyboards to facilitate engagement.
Each concept is being evaluated for business, brand, and operational implementation. Their success has enabled Lovesac to roadmap and prototype sustainable operations in 2024 and 2025, furthering their commitment to zero waste and zero emissions.
Lovesac’s brand philosophy is to create home furnishing products that are Designed For Life. That means so much more than building products to withstand the test of time and minimizing waste. Their products are also built to last by adapting to customers’ lives — boasting rearrangeable, expandable, movable, changeable, and washable components.
To deepen their commitment to environmental actions and responsibilities, Lovesac hired Prophet to help them define what a circular economy approach could mean for their business and brand — specifically pertaining to their proprietary modular couch, the Sactional. How could pre-loved cast-offs become trusted re-loved products reincorporated into the homes of new and existing customers?
The Challenge
I led a team of designers and brand strategists to invent and innovate Circle to Consumer (CTC) concepts relevant to the Lovesac brand, the Sactional product, and Lovsac’s customer profiles. Coupled with insights and research gathered by Lovesac, our team analyzed circular economy trends and cataloged analogous, relevant closed-loop programs.
We developed four distinct CTC service concepts, each offering various ways Sactional products could be used, upgraded, and maintained for longer — then recycled, traded-in, or reclaimed instead of wasted.
The concepts were designed and packaged for qualitative and quantitative customer testing. Note: Lovesac was interested in gathering customer resonance prior to investigating business, brand, and operational implications.
The Solution
No. 1 CULDESAC
No. 2 FLEX. LIVE. REPEAT.
No. 3 THE LOOP LAB
No. 4 LOVED BETTER
The concepts were tested with respondents — both non and current Sactional owners — with the following objectives in mind:
Explore concept impact; comprehension, appeal, relevance, and brand impact
Facilitate participant co-creation; build on and manipulate concepts, identify further use cases, and address more needs, desires, and pain points
Understand category influencers
Discern price tolerance
To seed the ideas more deeply and provoke more thoughtful discussion and feedback, we shared illustrated storyboards of potential experiences along with each concept description.
Customer Testing
No. 1 CULDESAC
No. 2 FLEX. LIVE. REPEAT
No. 3 THE LOOP LAB + No. 4 LOVED BETTER
The Results
All concepts tested remarkably well with respondents, so Lovesac has focused the ideas inward to explore the significance of the concepts on business, brand, and operations.
In 2024, they plan to roadmap and prototype these concepts in order to integrate looped, localized, and sustainable operations into their business. This is just the beginning of an elegant path toward Lovesac’s commitment to zero waste and zero emissions.