Innovation Strategy for Dress for Success Orillia and Barrie

Keywords: Innovation Strategy, Business Design, Design research, Print Design, Toolkit, Non-Profit, Service Design, Innovation Consulting, Small-Medium Enterprise

Dress for Success Orillia and Barrie’s mission is to empower women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools to help women thrive in work and in life.

Dress for Success came to us with their problem: an overstock of clothing, which presented a storage problem and was becoming a burden to the organization. Orillia residents were actively dropping off clothing - it just wasn’t the right kind. Dress for Success also realized that an overstock of clothing could be seen as a problem, or an opportunity.

Throughout this process, we have worked closely with the amazing team at Dress for Success to peel back the layers of a seemingly simple problem. In leveraging a design thinking approach, we were able to reframe the problem to be bigger than just an overstock of clothing and to highlight real opportunities to impact at all levels - from clients, to the community and the organization itself and inspire change.

Incorporating our clients into multiple phases of our design process allowed our team to better know and design for the client. Understanding the client as an expert on their organization; as a team it was essential to facilitate collaboration throughout this project. Our mission was to continually develop and grow within the team and to push the project into novel and innovative territory. To accomplish this, we split the project plan into three phases: Understanding, Exploration and Development.

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