Typical results
Our Approach
Portfolio
Identify and close gaps across your product portfolio to drive incremental growth
Streamline offerings to remove redundancies and unnecessary complexity
Design
Use deep customer insights to redesign product portfolios in order to deliver a wide range of offerings
Quality
Improving quality can decrease the number of returns and help build star ratings, which can also increase word-of-mouth referrals and reduce warranty issues
Supply chain
Decrease end-to-end logistic costs by trimming packaging and optimizing products
Drive growth by increasing the amount of stock on shelves without expanding the shelf space, and reducing the level of out-of-stock items
Sustainability
Increase knowledge about where sustainable materials and design approaches may be able to fulfill a dual mission of reducing both carbon footprints and cost
Featured capabilities
Resource cleansheet
Bring environmental and economic transparency to product development and procurement by integrating CO2 optimization with cost and product design.
Track CO2 emissions through the value chain to identify areas that could improve sustainability
Competitive landscape insights
The engine that drives the growth by design offering by utilizing technology that combines web scraping and the latest natural-language processing
Identify specific growth drivers within product portfolios and help clients understand overall performance, customer experience, and optimal assortment mix
Packaging benchmark database
This solution transforms—through digitization and AI—the otherwise slow and labor-intensive process of competitive design optimization in packaging categories
Create a more effective and efficient process with accelerated data collection and processing, benchmarking, and identifying new opportunities for competitive advantage
Design execution
Translate insights-driven opportunities into leading products focused on value, time-to-market, and cost. From concept with McKinsey Design through to testing and evaluation—and drawing on expertise from external partnerships—products deliver stakeholder value and fulfill user needs
Impact stories

Delivering a pioneering coffee product platform in record time
A company wanted to improve its commercial coffee brewing system.
We helped launch a six-month research, design, and implementation program to address growth challenges and meet the needs that were arising from new trends in coffee consumption among consumers.

Developing an end-to-end packaging and shipping solution for fast-food company
A fast-food company wanted to reduce the environmental impact of one of its food lines. By understanding more about customer confusion around recycling, a wasteful frozen-food supply chain, and applying a sustainability lens to packaging, we were able to help drive sustainability impact results. Highlights included one million serving bags eliminated annually, 80 tons of polypropylene removed from the waste stream, and the removal of 310 tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the production process

Optimizing box dimensions for better stocking and more sustainable fillers
Using a competitive teardown allowed us to help a manufacturer of woodworking equipment reduce box size by 30 percent and cut CO2 levels by 600,000 kilograms. Doing so solved a key challenge—allowing retailers to keep more products on the shelf during busy periods.
Our people

Dave Fedewa
PartnerAtlanta

Jan Henrich
Senior PartnerTokyo

Kristi Klitsch Weaver
Senior PartnerChicago

Jennifer Spaulding Schmidt
Senior PartnerMinneapolis

Daniel Swan
Senior PartnerConnecticut – Darien
