💡 Watch: Double click to watch Bathing Beauteas’ behind the scenes clip!

How can we create a bathing product to combat stress by utilizing the health benefits of tea?

Stress is a persistent issue everywhere. Many people look for healthy ways to reduce stress such as spa solutions, but find that:

• Spas can often be very expensive and time consuming.

• Many luxury bath products contain chemicals and artificial ingredients that can be harmful for skin.

I led my team in researching alternative solutions to create an accessible spa remedy using tea as the base ingredient for its many health benefits.

Research Findings

To start research with clients, I led my team in conducting 200 interviews in-person and using Google Surveys. We asked questions about resting habits, daily schedules, competitor profiling, and desired product features.

I gave some tasks and questions including:

We found some notable insights:

From this research, I learned that:

💡 Customers feel overwhelmed with the daily routine, but they still work attempt to work with it. They look for a product that can maximize their relaxation in a short amount of time.

Defining Our Client Personas

I created four personas from our customer interviews to detail the needs and expectations of different client groups. This helped guide all our design decisions moving forward.

Our research and insights initially created three personas, but we later discovered a fourth: new mothers who find that tea baths help soothe post-partum abdominal pains and increases the healing process.

Narrowing Down Our Teas

I helped Bathing Beauteas narrow down our choices of tea leaves based on their abundant health properties. Each main tea guided us in choosing specific fragrance oils to create a unique aromatheurapetic blend perfect for bathing in.

💡 Note: When choosing our teas, we also ask ourselves if the ingredient is within our budget and whether or not it can be sourced locally.

Who does Bathing Beauteas compete with?

Bathing Beauteas has a first mover advantage, as tea baths are a largely untapped market opportunity.

Large retailers like Lush and Bath & Body Works have a diverse product offering, but lack focus on tea-infused products. Etsy artisans create tea baths, but without a luxury feel and significant scaling potential.

Our niche focus on tea infused products, local sourcing and production.

Prototyping the Tea Bath Blends

Using our research knowledge, I led the prototyping of each tea bath recipe. We looked to historical tea bath traditions around the world for inspiration from Japan’s rice milk and green tea baths to Egypt’s Cleopatra-era milk and honey chamomile tea baths.

I worked with the team on over 47 trials and tests of the tea bath recipes using 8 different fragrance oils to develop the final formulas.

We use transparent mesh sachets to display the ingredients and allow the strong fragrance to come through. This allows consumers to smell the product’s unique blend and see exactly what they are buying.

The chart below shows the journey of how we created our product.

My research led to additional ingredients to add to the tea bath recipes. We began to prototype and realized we want to be transparent and display all the natural ingredients and their health benefits in our product.

The following were considerations to our clients’ needs:

• Picking ingredients with high skin-enriching properties such as honey powder and rice milk.

• Include ingredients known for easing muscle aches and pains such as epsom salts.

• Ensuring the materials add to the overall bathing experience with aromatherapeutic elements or coloring the bathing water such as with rice milk or milk powder.

Ideation & Finalization

I kept the users in mind throughout the ideation and prototyping stages. The end results were four main blends suited for our four customer personas.

Introducing the Final Designs

The final design includes a total of 4 main blends. View the product video here. The goals I established with my team at the beginning of our process laid the foundation for our design, and they were as follows:

• Ensure a personalized gift experience

• Create a unique blend for each client demographic

• Sustainability aspect and sourcing locally adds peace of mind value

Defining the Key Product Features

I worked closely with my team to define business needs, prototype goals, and product requirements. We made sure to solve the grievances we found in our customer research and highlight these particular features:

Launching Bathing Beauteas’ Tea Baths

Bathing Beauteas’ product line was successfully launched in March 2015 and broke even within 2 months.

Since the initial launch, Bathing Beauteas is located in local Seattle stores and made a television preview with King 5 News. 

The Outcome

Within 2 months, Bathing Beauteas broke even, developed a loyal customer base, product roadmap, and became a top-selling tea bath product in market. Post-launch, I worked on marketing strategy plans and product rebranding. Bathing Beauteas’ product line expanded to seasonal products and established wholesale partnerships with local boutiques.

Reflection

Going into my first product design project, I challenged myself to solve a problem in a market with a sustainable method.

With the design knowledge we gained throughout the research phase, we knew how to clearly identify and not lose sight of our original problem.

Using design sprints in our process, I learned how important it is to ideate, test, and reject ideas as quickly as possible in order to ensure that the end-product is viable for the customer.

While our project was successful in creating our main blends, we still have a few areas to address. In hindsight, we did not consider sample sizes as they are a growing entry point for new customers. We also considered the importance of good UX on our website to engage new clients.

Our proposal aims to help online shoppers make quick informed decisions by immersing them into an engaging narrative experience.

Feedback on the design? Want to chat over coffee about design or
e-commerce websites? Find me on LinkedIn.