When a product has found its audience, the next question is almost always the same: what comes next? For this company, expanding into new categories meant exploring new materials, new forms, and new use cases, all while staying true to what their existing customers already loved.
They had several promising directions in development and a clear mandate to identify where to invest. But internal enthusiasm only goes so far. The real test was whether families, the people who would actually buy and use whatever came next, would respond the same way.
The company needed live, authentic reactions to several new physical concepts across different product directions, to understand which ones generated real excitement, which raised concerns, and how each fit into the spaces and routines of everyday family life. For this company, answering that question meant getting out of the boardroom and into the living room.
Families experience products at home, which means that is also where the most honest reactions happen. For this project, sessions were conducted in a home setting designed to feel natural and relaxed, the kind of environment where kids actually behave like kids and parents actually behave like parents.
Parent and child pairs moved through each concept together, reacting in real time to directions they could see, touch, and interact with firsthand. Multiple age groups were represented across the sessions, capturing how different stages of childhood shaped reactions, preferences, and which concepts felt like a natural fit for different spaces in the home.
Getting authentic reactions from children requires a different kind of expertise than adult research. Kids don't engage with research the way adults do, and designing sessions that feel natural and age-appropriate is the difference between honest responses and performed ones. Every session was conducted with a parent present throughout, and the environment was designed from the start to feel safe, comfortable, and easy for kids of all ages to engage in freely.
The sessions gave the client something no internal review could: unfiltered family reactions to concepts still early enough to shape. The findings pointed clearly to which directions generated the strongest excitement, which raised the most barriers, and how families naturally envisioned each concept fitting into different areas of their home.
The client came away with a consumer-validated view of where to invest next, built entirely from real reactions from the people who would actually buy it.
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