Abstract
To approach innovative teaching, prototype development of tennis wear for female baby boomers was incorporated into the product development course. This semesterlong project, fully funded by Cotton Incorporated, guided students in identifying the needs of female baby boomers who play tennis and then designing appropriate tennis wear. Twelve female tennis participants aged between 55 and 66 were interviewed in a focus group. To mirror fashion industry practice, students worked in teams including with real-world clients. The functional, expressive, and aesthetic consumer needs model (Lamb and Kallal in Cloth Text Res J 10:42–47, 1992) provided the conceptual framework for the project, and the students took the FEA design criteria into account when developing tennis wear prototypes that met the needs of the baby boomers. At the end of the semester, a panel of faculty judges who fall within the age group of baby boomers and who play tennis regularly evaluated the student groups’ work and selected the three winning teams using the following criteria: creativity, quality (i.e., construction, tech pack [garment measurements], and fit), presentation (i.e., storyboard and oral presentation), and readiness for production.
Highlights
It is challenging, creating new products is an important mission in the fastpaced fashion world
One of the focus group participants offered her view of the market for female baby boomer tennis wear
Functional Some of the most important needs for tennis wear among female baby boomers are relevant to functional aspects such as comfort, fit, breathability, durability, free movement, utility, and sun protection
Summary
It is challenging, creating new products is an important mission in the fastpaced fashion world. To promote a better understanding of how to creatively produce an apparel product from concept to consumer, a new project was designed to teach a product development course, which motivated the students through the use of an innovative teaching method. In Domodharan and Rengarajan’s study (2007), the use of innovative teaching methods has the potential to improve education, and to empower students to achieve their development goal, while the traditional teaching methods result that there is insufficient interaction with students in classroom and gives a lack of any practical and real life time situations to students. A product development process begins by identifying the potential target market. According to Keiser and Garner (2012), “Product developers and retailers expend a great
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