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LOLA makes period and sexual wellness products with their customer foremost in mind. Their founders believe that people should know exactly what materials people are putting into their bodies. Communication is central to LOLA’s brand ethos–both by providing their community with the health and wellness information they need to make smart decisions, and also by listening to their customers to meet their needs and wants.
As the LOLA brand continues to grow, they’ve made use of consumer data to guide their creation of products people will love.
While LOLA got its start as a direct-to-consumer business, the brand has come a long way since its founding. LOLA’s tampons are now available in brick and mortar retailers nationwide, including HEB, FredMeyer, Wegmans and more. But there’s still work to be done to make LOLA’s 100% organic tampons available to every shopper across the US.
“As we look to make a bigger retailer push, we've been trying to figure out how we can really stand out on shelf while also showcasing what our differentiator is,” said General Manager Kelly Murphy. “We've been trying to lean more into the sustainability of our products, but we've got other competitors that are also sustainable,” said Kelly of the challenge.
If you’ve seen LOLA’s tampons, then you may recognize their minimalist, clean, blue packaging. “We already use packaging that has a strong association with sustainability,” said Kelly. But the team had also begun work designing new packaging that uses a different design approach to more directly cue sustainability.
That brought them to the next step–consumer testing. And that’s where Highlight’s digital concept testing came in handy.
To see if a packaging update would help LOLA meet their sustainability goals–and drive trial, increase velocity, and win new retailer partnerships–the LOLA team used a monadic concept test comparing their current packaging to a new design.
First and foremost, the people behind the Highlight platform helped guide LOLA’s concept test to success. “The team is so great, and so wonderful to work with,” attested Kelly.
The platform gave Kelly and the LOLA team what they needed, too. “ I think Highlight has done a great job of making this self-serve and easy to set up,” said Kelly of the process.
Recruiting testers from Highlight’s nationwide community of pre-profiled, verified individuals went quickly, and even resulted in an overage. To land on a sample size of at least 100 completed surveys for each concept, the Highlight platform over-recruited, resulting in 52% more responses than requested.
Then came the most exciting part: the results. Using the Insights section of the Highlight platform, Kelly and her team were able to get the data they needed to make smarter decisions about their packaging.
“ It's easy to navigate around to slice and dice [the data],” said Kelly. “It’s especially easy to pull the insights– that feels like a big improvement over some of those other platforms I've used.”
LOLA’s survey respondents left plenty of qualitative feedback, too. While qualitative data provides immense value, anyone in consumer insights can tell you it’s also the most laborious part of the data analysis process–or at least it used to be, before Highlight.
With Highlight AI summaries, users can quickly peruse their open-end responses and filter by keywords to see how consumers are describing the stimuli or product in their own words.
“ The AI summaries are incredibly valuable,” said Kelly. “Open-end responses are always the arduous part. Is someone really going to read through all those thousands of responses? Having that done for you reduces the amount of time from insight to action.”
LOLA’s a growing business with plenty of teams eager to infuse their work with consumer insights.
“The next step is sending these results out to a broader cross functional group,” explained Kelly, “including the ops team, the marketing teams, creative teams, etc. I'd love to get buy-in and feedback from the broader team as to whether these results suggest that we should make a change to our packaging.”
That sharing process is easier with Highlight’s instant reports. Highlight users can click on the “Reports” tab to download a PowerPoint document of their summarized results, or customize their report with a specific segment of consumers, confidence level, or concept stimuli.
Highlight AI turns your results into instant reports you can share out to the broader team or leadership for insights the whole team can use, faster.
The team has some decisions to make, but now, they have the power of consumer insights to guide them. While their concept for updated packaging performed well, especially on perceived sustainability metrics as they had hoped, their current packaging scored highly on other important metrics like premium perception.
“This is why you have to test,” said Kelly. Because while a team brainstorming session can take you a long way, the decision isn’t always cut and dry. Data from actual consumers helps mitigate the murkiness of guessing what will succeed. Said Kelly, “I'm so grateful for having been able to test at this level of statistical significance.”
So what can you expect to see the next time you go to buy LOLA tampons? Stay tuned, as packaging updates powered by Highlight insights may be coming to a shelf near you soon.
Keep up with all of LOLA’s updates–including their partnerships with WNBA teams like the New York Liberty and the Minnesota Lynx!–on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.