What I Wish I Knew Before We Built MakerSights

by Dan Leahy, Co-Founder & CEO

Since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 captured the public imagination, companies have been asking themselves the same question: how should we incorporate AI into our business?

When we asked ourselves that same question at MakerSights, we decided to anchor our AI investments in solving problems we’ve identified in our decade of helping brands better understand their consumers.

In those 10 years, we’ve seen some great results - and we’ve also had a front row seat to where things haven’t quite clicked.

It turns out that injecting insights into creative processes is really hard! Not because teams or companies don’t want it, but because of the day-to-day realities they face:

#1 - Insights teams are stretched thin

Design and merchandising teams are expected to move quickly, often without time to test.

Innovation teams are tasked with thinking ahead, but don’t always have the tools to validate early ideas before they get shelved or fast-tracked.

And executives want their teams to embrace best-in-class data & analytics to support their jobs, but often don’t know where to start.

#2 - Traditional research often feels burdensome

Weeks of intake and study execution that result in 50 page Powerpoint reports in which takeaways are hard to determine and even harder to put into action; too many steps to get a read on even one idea, let alone all the ideas your team is actually exploring.

#3 - Costs can quickly stack up

Resulting in only the biggest launches and campaigns getting consumer insights love, while the vast majority of decisions being made while flying blind.

That’s what we wish we understood more deeply when we launched MakerSights.

The appetite for insights isn’t the issue. The process of getting that insight is.

So we stepped back and asked ourselves: how can we harness the power of AI to re-think the process of getting insights?

• What if the research didn’t slow you down, but actually kept pace with your team?
• What if testing a product idea felt as simple as uploading a file?
• What if it was trivial to test the entirety of your line, multiple times, every season?
• What if when you have questions at the start of a meeting, you could get accurate consumer driven answers before your meeting was even over?
• Could we dramatically shrink the distance between the consumer-centricity brands seek to embrace, and the limited consumer insight that actually drives most decisions brands make?

That’s how MakerLabs came to life.

We took everything we’d learned over the years; the rigor of a decade of high quality consumer research; the capabilities of our Consumer Intelligence platform; and the new possibilities unlocked by Large Language Models to create something different - an always-on product insights Lab.

At the heart of MakerLabs is a technology we call Digital Twins. These are AI models trained on millions of real consumer responses, built to reflect how your specific audience thinks and shops.

They let you test how your product ideas will perform with real consumers, without having to go run a new survey every time.

Instead of navigating the usual maze of testing, defining the right range, hunting down product imagery, crafting a questionnaire, scoping an audience, and waiting weeks for results, you can now upload your product ideas and get feedback in less than an hour.

MakerLabs delivers the insights you need to make faster, more confident product decisions.

You get sentiment scores, ranked performance, and focused qualitative feedback, all grounded in your category and your consumer.

And since the Digital Twins are regularly refreshed with real, high quality consumer insights, your results reflect the latest shifts in the market and consumer sentiment.

MakerLabs is the natural evolution of everything we’ve built and learned over the past 10 years.

It gives design teams the freedom to test out a wider range of new ideas, helps merchants make more informed calls faster, and supports innovation teams with the confidence they need to move new concepts forward.

We created MakerSights with the vision of reducing the distance between creatives and the consumers they serve. Until today, delivering on that promise required substantial budgets, flexible timelines, and a lot of heavy lifting.

Going forward, brands will be armed with an always-on visibility into the needs of the consumers they serve.

We can’t wait to witness what this helps our brands to confidently create.

Curious? Learn more about MakerLabs.

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