Generative Artificial Intelligence and Design Co-Creation in Luxury New Product Development: The Power of Discarded Ideas

Generative AI is currently shaping creative industries in ways that are challenging to comprehend and even more challenging to forecast. Within this dynamic context – and with a team of corporate collaborators on the front line of these changes, our research examined a series of fundamental, important research questions in the luxury fashion industry. Specifically, we bring together a company that hosts a co-creation digital platform for fashion design (AWAYTOMARS), a well-known and esteemed luxury fashion brand which committed to manufacture and sell the products emerging from the research (Missoni), and a leading technology company that applies generative AI to user innovation via machine learning (IBM). In the course of this real-world, multi-year project, we worked with this team to develop t-shirt designs that were designed either by human product designers exclusively or by AI-design recommendations (as interpreted by human designers). Results from a controlled experiment with more than 1,000 participants revealed that consumers preferred the AI-designed t-shirts, however, only when they were unaware of the design source. In addition, we were able to track actual sales data over 20 weeks. Findings support the promise of AI in this space: the sales lift of the AI-designed t-shirts mounted to 127%.