Chanel is a French luxury fashion house specializing in women’s fashion, luxury goods, and accessories. Chanel revolutionized fashion in the early 20th century by replacing structured corset-silhouettes with more functional clothing for women. Chanel achieved the incredible performance of entering the watch market with a very innovative model, the iconic J12. Using ceramic as the prime material of this watch created an unprecedented success for the product across the world.

It is always very hard to stay on top, especially when your environment is changing at a high speed. This is the everyday challenge for Chanel’s Marketing and Acquisition team: how to keep the J12 watch a sales hit in the next ten years? 

The Schoolab team used its unique Design Fiction framework to unveil scenarios about the future of the luxury industry and the positioning of Chanel. The aim was not to predict the future but to immerse the stakeholders in what could be the new demands from their clients and how Chanel could pioneer new experiences and activation tools. 

After dozens of interviews, we created a wide range of possible futures including new customers, the evolution of the product, new consumer behaviours, and new metrics of success. Following Chanel’s teams’ intuition, we carefully selected the most promising ones and ran a workshop with the main stakeholders in the company. The outcomes of the workshop have been used as the basis for the new strategic roadmap for the J12 team and ecosystem.