Lab56 for Jägermeister

WHY

For decades Jägermeister was very successful as a single product and brand company - and they still are. However, the company decided to secure and increase its success by growing their portfolio with new products and services. With Jägermeister Manifest and Jägermeister Scharf, it launched its first line extensions, invested in Gin Sul and through M-Ventures in the platform artnight.com.

HOW

Briefing: Based on our expertise in herbs, we want to develop new ideas for beverages and tangible prototypes that could contribute to a ‘best nights of your life‘ experience for our customers.

ignore gravity developed a multi-stage process going from inspiration through ideation to concept development and rapid prototyping with an interdisciplinary team of food-tech experts, chefs, bartenders and creatives from related playgrounds.

WHAT

Inspiration: At the beginning of the first week, we visited the Jägermeister headquarter, receiving many insightful inputs by Dr. Bernd Finke, scientist and Global Head of Production, offered useful insights into the ingredients and production of Jägermeister. In addition, every expert from the team shared an inspiring keynote featuring exciting stories and ideas from their playground.

Ideation: After the inspiration sessions we moved into several loops of idea sprints, resulting in more than 150 ideas. From this pool of ideas, the team selected the 10 most promising and turned them into concepts. These concepts were shared with selected consumers and the Jägermeister team in order to implement their feedback. Next, our project management team was challenged with the task of sourcing all the technological equipment, material and ingredients that the interdisciplinary expert team needed to turn their concepts into prototypes.

Rapid prototyping: For the second week, we turned a loft, with an event kitchen, into a temporary lab that became the coolest playground that food-tech nerds can dream of. Over the course of five days, all concepts were turned into prototypes that we again presented to the Jägermeister team and consumers.

Results: Eight of the prototypes were presented by the expert team to the Jägermeister management, including Michael Volke (Chief Executive Officer), Dr. Berndt Finke (Global Head of Production) and Wolfgang Möller (Chief Marketing Officer). All of them gave very good feedback on the prototypes. The next stage will see the prototypes evaluated and prioritised for further development.

Learnings: The diversity of competencies in our expert team was a key driver for the success of the lab. The experts collaborated very well and with a lot of appreciation and respect for the skills and experience of the others.

Creating an environment and atmosphere that allowed all participants to try and explore all kind of ideas released a lot of creative energy.

We have developed similar innovation labs in the past, but specifically for digital prototypes and business models. It was great to see how the format worked for the development of physical products.