100+ products over 30+ years
In the late 1980’s Lucky Goldstar was a relatively unknown brand internationally. As part of the rebrand to LG, the South Korean company searched for bright sparks to help them create products that would appeal to Western consumers. What began as key projects for critical regions and sectors, grew into a long-term strategic design partnership with LG, spanning Mobile Communications, Home Appliances, Consumer Products and Home Entertainment. Today, we work with their business and innovation centre, creating innovative applications and design solutions for LG’s leading technologies.
Services
- Product Design
- Design Engineering
- Colour, material & finish
- User Experience & UI
- Trend Forecasting & Vision Setting
Learning
In the 1990’s LG’s thirst for creative stimulus within their rapidly growing design centre in Seoul was voracious. Our role as an external design consultancy was to stimulate thinking, inject innovative ideas, and introduce new approaches with a fresh perspective. Over successive years we worked closely with their internal teams and business units, getting them to think outside the box and develop design strategies to drive innovation.
Projects included category-leading collections and product ranges for multiple sectors and geographies, with meaningful insights being unlocked through ethnographic research and inspirational design stimuli, with outstanding design solutions being created.
Leaping
By the year 2000, we were helping LG to better understand the European consumer, especially the needs of key retailers and operators, supporting them to devise a strategy that would enable successful entry into the wider European market.
Through multiple insight research and design strategy projects, we successfully set the characteristics that distinguished LG in Europe, delivering category-leading product ranges for markets including mobile, kitchen appliances, air conditioning systems, TVs and audio systems. Over a thirty-year period, we have completed over one hundred projects.
In total, we’ve helped LG to think forward, anticipate and react to changes in consumer trends and behaviours, and raise the quality of their design outcomes to improve suitability and desirability.
Landing
The most important benefit over the course of our partnership has been inspiring future developments and the design of best-selling, iconic ranges.
As LG’s needs have developed over time, so has our role. We now work as partners to LG’s innovation and business units, helping to explore how their core technologies can be better utilised across sectors including the smart home, finance and banking, and mobility.
Co-working with tangerine, we started to break away from functional design to emotional design. We began to focus much more on the user’s perspective than the product styling.
Youngho Kim, former Vice-President at LG Electronics
