150 students, one day, one real brief.

UNIQLO and Monash University: ImpactHack

The challenge

UNIQLO Australia wanted fresh thinking from the demographic they design for, and they wanted it fast. Not a case study written for a classroom, and not a focus group reacting to finished work. A genuine question, put to students who are also customers.

We partnered with Monash University. UNIQLO Australia set the brief. We ran the day.

What we did

One day, university students from across disciplines, working on Uniqlo's brief.

The day ran in two halves. Students started on a robotics and automation challenge, programming and coding robotics cars, then moved into designing their own Uniqlo t-shirts. From there they went into the entrepreneurship stream, learning to identify problems in their own communities and working through prototyping and business modelling.

It ended with a pitch finale.

The outcome

Students pitched their ideas to the Chief Operating Officer, the Chief Financial Officer and the group advisor to the CEO at Uniqlo Australia. Three of the most senior people in the Australian business came down for the day, heard the pitches, and met the students afterwards.

Around 20 ideas were pitched across the day. They covered how Uniqlo could expand its offering and how it could improve customer service, all of it coming from students who shop there themselves.

The value for Uniqlo was volume and speed. Twenty concepts in a single day, generated in parallel by teams working the same brief, is a different output to one agency response. It also put the senior team in a room with Monash students, which means the ones who impressed them are identifiable.

What's next

The model transfers. A company brings a genuine question, a university brings students, and we run the day so both sides get something out of it. If your organisation has a question worth putting in front of a room of students, we would like to hear it.

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