The Salomon Interview

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

I am the Innovation Project Manager in the Winter Sports Innovation team for 3 years now. So we are responsible for managing the projects during the first phase where we explore them, before delivering 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 somewhat neutral consumers. That's why we came to see Episto, for a visor helmet project and practicality. We needed to understand a bit about all the stakes behind that product, and on a large scale, in different countries, and independently from the specific Salomon products we were proposing.

What did you think of Episto?

The collaboration with Episto was very pleasant and very effective. The platform is super ergonomic, so it's very nice because we can easily manipulate the data, we can go back to it easily, we can do it with colleagues in a project group, etc. So that's really appreciated.

And then the platform itself and the methodology behind it were hyper-adapted to this project, to have a bit of quantitative data, to gather a lot of data in many different countries and extremely quickly. We received the data in 48 hours, I believe. So it was very interesting.

We supplemented this with a small interview conducted by a Chatbot which was also very relevant. So it went very well.

What benefits did you gain from the collaboration?

It will primarily be speed. I was impressed to see the speed at which we gathered so many responses in so many different countries. That is something that is valuable to us and so it has really been a plus. The support from the teams, once again, to design good questionnaires, ask the right questions, to obtain the most relevant and useful answers possible for us.

It has really been very interesting. It allowed, 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 improve our skills a bit, to take a step forward to better analyze consumer needs, to better understand their uses. And that is really guiding for us for the follow-up projects. So we won't go in with personal convictions, but with things that are founded.

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

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

It resonated in other teams that do similar work to ours on other activities who are also interested, since it clearly filled a gap we had and that is very well filled today by Episto.