Extra Credit Assignment 2
The world is full of entrepreneurs who have created a business or product that they believed in. The industry of modeling is no different. The article from Forbes.com identifies a plus size woman, Ashley Graham, who created the healthy image of women to be pictured on the front cover of Sport Illustrated Magazine along with her own lingerie line. The article is written by Susan Adams who demonstrated a unique take on the everyday interviewing process which relates to the concepts of interviewing biases that we have discussed in class.
The first concept that the article shows is about the business model with a closer look at two of the nine components; value proposition and customer segment. The article not only shows how entrepreneurs’ ideas come in all shapes and sizes but so do their owners. Graham not only is the first plus size woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but she has produced her own clothing line that has over $1.6 million in sales. She uses the business model to segment her market and assess the needs and values of her customers.
The first step in the business model that I will be examining is the value proposition and how it is all about satisfying the needs of your customers and solving the problems that occur. This concept allows Graham to connect with her customers on a unique level by offering them a clothing/ lingerie line for those women who are plus size. She solves the plus sized women’s problem of finding lingerie by creating a line that is affordable yet elegant. This improves the situation by allowing Graham to be one of the few owners to have created such a line. She goes into depth about how her line values her customer’s needs by producing a gain that they can relate to such as plus size and affordable. The line was created to be different from those of its competitors by showing the value that comes from women who want to feel good in their bodies instead of being covered up like other companies try to do. By having the owner of the clothing line be a plus size woman herself, it helps to create value and emphasis on what the brand is trying to portray. Since the value proposition is about satisfying the needs of your customers or solving their problem, she went out and identified the archetypes of her customers.
The second step in the model shows the concept of customer segments which consists of profiling customers and figuring out the archetypes such as the age, gender, weight. She talks about how when she started modeling, there weren't hardly any plus sized models or a lingerie line for them which led her to see a niche market for a customer base. Graham found that her main focus would be on