The Salomon Interview

Hello, my name is Nans Girodengo and I have been working at Salomon for 7 years.

I have been the Innovation Project Manager in the Winter Sports Innovation team for 3 years now. We are responsible for managing projects during the initial exploration phase, before handing over concepts to the development experts.

Why did you choose Episto?

We were introduced by a colleague at Salomon who advised us to work with Episto because we needed to step outside the Salomon walls and reach out to neutral consumers. That's why we approached Episto for a visor helmet project centered on practicality. We needed to understand the various stakes behind that product on a large scale, across different countries, and independently from the specific Salomon products we were developing.

What did you think of Episto?

The collaboration with Episto was very pleasant and highly effective. The platform is super ergonomic, making it very nice to use because we can easily manipulate the data, revisit it easily, and work on it with colleagues in a project group. So that was really appreciated.

And then the platform itself and the methodology behind it were perfectly adapted to this project allowing us to get quantitative data and gather a lot of information across many different countries extremely quickly. We received the data in 48 hours, I believe, so it was very impressive.

We supplemented this with a short interview conducted by a chatbot, which was also highly relevant, so it went very well.

What benefits did you gain from the collaboration?

It was primarily the speed. I was impressed by how fast we gathered so many responses across so many different countries. That is something truly valuable to us, so it has really been a major plus. The support from the teams was also excellent helping us design good questionnaires and ask the right questions to obtain the most relevant and useful answers possible.

It has really been very interesting. It allowed us, each time, to shed some light on the debate at the beginning of the project. It's something we like to do at the very start, which we used to do a lot with stores in a somewhat empirical way, we might say.

And here, it allowed us to step up our game a bit, taking a step forward to better analyze consumer needs and better understand their habits. That is really guiding us for the follow-up projects, so we won't go in with personal convictions, but with facts that are well-founded.

So it has really been very useful. Consequently, we continued to work with Episto and have launched studies on other projects.

It has proven itself. Therefore, the collaboration will continue there is no doubt about it. It will even continue beyond our team, since we have shared the results internally.

It resonated with other teams that do similar work to ours on other product lines, who are also interested, since it clearly filled a gap we had one that is very well addressed today by Episto.