Sorry, couldn’t resist that headline. But this is actually a serious story about how design thinking can be applied to even seemingly frivolous products—such as underwear. PACT, a new underwear brand started by entrepreneurs Jason Kibbey and Jeff Denby, with help from designer extraordinaire Yves Behar (one of the featured stars of Glimmer), is off to a flying start. The company creates underwear that is considered “green” because it is made with organic cotton, using an eco-friendly production process and compostable packaging. The PACT line also features clever, attractive pattern designs, thanks in part to Behar, who agreed to design the first three prints in the collection. And if all that weren’t enough, PACT donates 10 percent of its sales to great nonprofit organizations like Oceana, ForestEthics, and 826 National.

 

Denby and Kibbey got the idea for the company while studying at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. As they launched their plan, they went through a step-by-process that echoes a number of the principles outlined in Glimmer—which is to say, they “asked stupid questions” about the nature of underwear and people’s relationship to it; they also “jumped fences” by connecting to lateral ideas not normally associated with underwear (such as social activism); and they took the trouble to “go deep” into the underwear drawers of people they knew (with permission of course—actually, they mostly asked people to send them pictures of their underwear, which may seem like a creepy thing to do but it provided some good insights). To sum up, the design process helped them figure out how to come at an old, stale business in a fresh new way. And designers like Behar have helped them to bring their ideas and vision to life in the form of a dynamic product line.

 

Their early success is testament to another point raised in Glimmer: That “design is the new advertising.” If you think about it, these startup guys don’t have the money to advertise the way, say, Hanes does. But because they’ve designed something that is interesting in its own right and also has a strong social activism component built-in, they’ve been getting free media attention and plenty of online buzz. It reminds me of a similar case study covered in Glimmer, involving the successful startup TOM’s Shoes, which managed to create a sensation by designing a cool product and an even cooler business plan in which the company gives away one pair of shoes for every pair sold.

 

 

Which is not say the PACT guys don’t appreciate the value of a good ad slogan: They’ve come up with the clever line, “Change starts with your underwear.”