Listening pays. Listening to customers leads to extra sales and profits. That’s the experience of fashion designer and consultant Diana Carolina Yanes.
Diana is the designer behind the innovative and stylish FlyOn Jacket. With its 14 internal pockets, the FlyOn Jacket can carry as much as a standard carry-on (up to 15.4 lbs / 7 kg), saving you hundreds of dollars in baggage fees.
As a keen traveller, Diana created this hack to avoid baggage charges when travelling on budget airlines for short city breaks.
Originally from Venezuela, Diana’s career as a design consultant in the fashion industry has spanned four continents since 2011. She now works with clients throughout Europe and beyond.
Diana is an entrepreneur who combines her creative talents and extensive fashion industry experience with smart business thinking.
She enhances her own creativity by crowd-sourcing; in other words, capturing the best ideas from outside her business, from her community. She invites comments and feedback. And Diana listens!
Diana launched the FlyOn Jacket using a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. Not only is that a great way to raise finance and achieve pre-launch sales, it’s also a way to get feedback from potential customers. You could call it “crowd-testing”.
Diana explained
“Even before we launched, we built an online community, to involve potential customers in the journey of product development, and to build excitement. Somebody asked if the jacket had RFID-blocking pockets. I looked it up and decided that we could add them as an option, for a small extra cost. The process of listening and responding to that customer’s needs produced extra sales and another dimension to our product.”
Doing market research can be daunting. Perhaps the term makes us think of big expensive operations, like the ones conducted by the largest corporations. Instead, if we use the term ‘social listening’, it becomes more practical, more do-able. We can then think of common sense ways to find out what customers think of our products and services, even before we launch. Market research is not so much about techniques but having an attitude that is open minded and prepared to seek ideas and opinions from outside the business.
Diana said:
“By judging the reaction of people to the campaign, adjusting according to their ideas and suggestions, we can refine the product before the final version is produced. And even when production had started, we were willing to add additional features if there was a demand. We love responding to customers’ ideas and designing for their needs.”
Creative entrepreneurs worldwide could become even more successful by following Diana’s process of listening, responding – and selling more!
Links
www.dianayanes.com
FlyOn Jacket on Kickstarter
Text copyright © David Parrish 2025. Some rights reserved (Creative Commons Licence)
Images used with permission
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