When You Put a ‘Cat’ in the Attic

Photo: Pricewise Insulation, Australia

When I was a young researcher, I believed I could do the best research in a category that I knew about. While we try not to be too anecdotal in research, I thought I could add more to a category when starting with baseline knowledge. At the time, I was immersed in raising young children, so toys and baby products were my comfort zone. As a long-time groomer, haircare appliances and makeup were a sweet spot for me. As a long-time eater, chocolate, snack foods (especially salty snacks), and tableware were categories I could build from…. But the pink insulation in my attic? No. I wasn’t even starting at ground level. I knew nothing about this and felt I had nothing to add. Just thinking about fiberglass made me itch. I was less than excited to be assigned to immerse myself in the insulation category (with many Home Depot trips). 

However, this project represents a turning point for me and my research career. This was the project where I learned that I could start at ground level and by using the same research curiosity I’d brought to many other projects, I could explore and find opportunities.

I even learned that sometimes it’s beneficial to NOT know the category. I could ask naive questions and have contractors explain installing insulation more thoroughly than peer-to-peer. 

So, how did I learn? In classic design research, you start with empathy building. You buy the product and install it yourself. You spend too much time in Home Depot intercepting employees, deciphering the aisle signs, understanding secondary purchases (gloves, kneepads, scissors, measuring tape, staple gun, garbage bags), and piling everything in the biggest car in your friend group. Once home, you figure out how to get everything (including a few observers) into your attic. And then you start ripping out your old insulation to replace it with the pristine, rapidly expanding pink fluffy stuff. It takes longer than you expect. After the allotted 2 hours, you haven’t accomplished nearly enough, but the observers go home and leave you to finish the job (curses!)

While the installation was by no means perfect, it was a crash course in the typical process a homeowner goes through. And the challenges and frustrations along the way. But I haven’t even tackled the ‘cat’ yet.

You see, insulation is sold in different product forms: bats, which are pre-formed sheets sized to fit in between the 2x4 spacing in your attic, and loose fill, which is basically cotton candy that you need a machine to blow onto your attic floor. 

You can rent an Attic-Cat from your local home improvement store, assuming they have them available on the same day that you have help available. You need to calculate how many packs of insulation you need to buy, and it’s impossible to ‘eyeball’ it because it’s super compressed. You need a truck or a van to pick up the Attic-Cat, but the bags of insulation take up the most space. You need outdoor power because you run the Attic-Cat machine outside, but snake a long hose up to your attic, likely through a window. It’s definitely a two-person job so that one person can load the Attic-Cat (which fluffs the insulation, just like at Build-a-Bear), and one person can blow the insulation into the attic. You keep adding insulation until you reach a recommended depth, which becomes an estimate at best. There’s some pre-calculations you had to do with R-values (and it’s been a few years, so I’m not going to pretend to remember this) and then you try to hit that depth throughout your attic. It’s messy. You had to wear a mask. You ended up itchy, even if you kept your distance. Like installing bats, it took way longer than estimated. But empathy was definitely built. We now understood what homeowners went through, and we also walked away with many product improvement ideas, both within our project scope and outside of scope. 

Empathy building is just the first step of design thinking. Once we had a handle on a typical homeowner experience, we moved on to speak with contractors and store employees. We audited brands in the store aisles. We research trends in insulation, including green energy solutions. Many sources of information later, we delivered our ‘Phase 1 report’ to our client, the consumer and contractor journeys, which lead to the pre-ideas for concept development. 

In many ways, our deliverable was not unlike other Phase 1 report-outs. We had explored the category, asked many questions, experienced the journey ourselves, and relied on experts to fill in the gaps. While I was by no means an insulation expert at this point, I’d been deeply immersed in the category. I knew 100% more than I did a month prior, and definitely had enough knowledge to identify some improvement opportunities. 

This was the project where I learned that a research toolkit can be applied to any category. This has remained true as I’ve now explored over 50 different product categories. Recruiting the right people may be tougher in some categories than others. Understanding product differences may be more complex in some categories than others. But largely, with a well-rounded set of research skills, you can listen and learn in any product category.