Or, “The beautiful blessing of naïveté”

As a founder who has bootstrapped from day one, I can tell you there are ups and downs to running a business. You must stay agile, building up quickly when business explodes and rightsizing when the market dictates. This requires taking risks and venturing into the unknown. It’s exciting but terrifying. 

If you’re reading this, you already know something about us, because we’re largely an off-the-radar, boutique firm, sort of if you know you know. We attract new clients solely by referral. As such, we’re strongly guided by the needs of our loyal clients as they evolve.

One of those needs for years now has been having global reach. So, if you’ve ever wondered how a tiny firm delivers insights reports straight from luxury buyers in China, I’m going to tell you.

At the beginning of Covid, LookLook was still a native app, and it was usable in China, but luxury consumers there were already finnicky about anything that wasn’t on WeChat because of the firewalls. So, it was either get on a flight to China or come up with a new solution. When we decided to take the downtime in early 2020 to rebuild LookLook as a progressive web app, I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to conduct digital research in China. 

Fortunately, my dear Shanghainese friend Elizabeth Wo, whom I met while conducting research for lululemon in the late 2010’s, gave me a challenge: build a WeChat mini program. The “super app” is how all the brands in China interact with people there. It was still kind of new, even in China (by now, all global consumer brands have them). Liz made it sound so easy! (It wasn’t.) Through her connections to a developer who worked with a combination of JavaScript and Tencent’s proprietary WXSS, we did it in four months.

Now, Chinese luxury consumers simply take our QR code and log on locally to our studies. And our clients can view the raw data both in the original Mandarin and groomed into English by our native Mandarin speakers (Liz herself and her team of translators).

A few years later, we’ve now used this mini program, called MyLookLook and available on WeChat, for over fifteen global clients, from BMW to Jimmy Choo to LVMH beauty brands. We are incredibly proud of our ability to connect to our China “virtual confessional”. 

All this to say – whether you are a founder or someone responsible for innovation, never shy away from a challenge. If an idea seems daunting but a little thrilling, it’s usually a good choice. Was it easy to hold developer briefings across time zones with a simultaneous translator? No. We did it the hard way, but we are truly harvesting some rare and precious insights now, just when it really matters to understand how to navigate difficult economic times. Nothing in this life that’s great is easy. And sometimes it is when things seem most uncertain that taking a risk most satisfyingly pays off.