A Case Study — Craftsman Mechanics Hand Tools Management

Here's a case study to give you an idea of a real-life innovation challenge Growth Engine worked through with a client.

The Goal:
Increase the sales of Craftsman Mechanic Hand Tools in Sears' stores.

The Story:
Danaher Specialty Tools Group asked Growth Engine, collaborating with HMSDesign, to help them increase sales of Craftsman Mechanic Hand Tools after several years of limited or flat sales. After reviewing all available data, documents and other materials (including a large deck from a respected consulting firm with limited executional recommendations) Growth Engine engaged in a series of facilitated conversations with the client and Sears to start to explore their desired deliverables for the project. Growth Engine then initiated its Iterative Insight Mining™ approach to listen to tool professionals, do-it-yourselfers, novices and several other important consumer segments with the goal of understanding key drivers in the hand tool category and to begin uncovering insights into the purchasing motivation and behavior. We coupled this with a quantitative, in-store observational study to understand actual shopping behavior in the store environment. This initial work (the Knowing stage) led to well-designed joint ideation sessions with the Danaher, Sears, HMSDesign and the Growth Engine team to develop ideas to grow the Sears business.

In the next stage (the Doing stage), more than 250 ideas were created. They included new product ideas, new store navigation ideas, new ways to design and package sets and new promotional sets. Following the ideation, HMSDesign took the most promising raw concepts and turned them into concept boards. Then Growth Engine took them back to target consumers for further development, refinement and validation. The response was overwhelming, and at least twelve concepts were moved along for development and launch.

In the end, the Sears buyer was so enthusiastic that he said, "I'm excited. I don't see anything here that isn't possible for us to do together."

HMSDesign continued working with Danaher and Sears to redesign the navigational posters, the tool set package design and the design of the new products.

The Result:
Sales of Mechanics Hand Tools are up strongly in Sears' stores due to better visibility of the offerings, better set assortment, better in-store navigation and the launch of several key new product offerings. There are more new products that were developed by Growth Engine that are still in the pipeline and will be launched over the next year. Danaher received an unprecedented six Vendor of the Year awards from Sears for this ground-breaking work."