While listening to yogis talking about their experiences with their yoga mats, you often pick up the term “high-quality yoga mat”. But what actually is a high-quality yoga mat and how does it look like? Different characteristics such as damping, size, thickness etc. are all criteria a high-quality yoga mat needs to fulfill. Slip-resistance is another commonly used term when assessing high-quality yoga mats. This criteria is often even ranked as the most important one. So basically, a yoga mat should not be too thick and too heavy so that you can carry it easily with. However, at the same time your knees should not hurt when kneeling on your mat.
Regarding the size of a yoga mat, there are again different opinions among all the yogis. Some yogis want to have a lot of space on their yoga mat. Some yogis are relatively tall and therefore really need a big yoga mat. Then there are also yogis who rather prefer a smaller yoga mat. These two examples of customer preferences regarding thickness and size demonstrate:
The understanding of a high-quality yoga mat is quite subjective
Of course, this made it quite challenging and tough for us since we were trying to elaborate the main criteria of a high-quality yoga mat. But how to pursue when you have so many different opinions and criteria? We wanted to integrate all these opinions and let people share their ideas with us. So we used customer co-creation to get feedback on our prototypes and to let people and users of our product design and develop our product further with the goal of creating our sustainable and high-quality yoga mat.
Our cooperation with the JOSEPHS – an open innovation lab of the Fraunhofer Institute
We got a great scholarship by “Bayern Kreativ” which enabled us to present our current prototypes at the JOSEPHS. People can take a break there during their shopping trip in the city and visit an innovative exhibition of products. Our hejhej-mats yoga mats are one product which you can test there. You can decide whether you only want to give a really brief evaluation or you can really test our product and give detailed feedback. A short video clip shows you some yoga poses and you can follow our instruction – on our hejhej-mats. Basically, this is market research but not the familiar online market research with filling out questionnaire. It is a more innovative and new kind of live market research.
The term customer co-creation is currently quite popular
We really love the idea of designing and developing a product together with the future users. Thus, we believe that customer co-creation helps us in making the best high-quality yoga mat on the market. We already got some really interesting feedback regarding characteristics of our mats. We can integrate this information directly into our developing process. Consequently, we will directly produce new prototypes fulfilling the required demand of our customers.
