Behind every award-worth project is a story for teamwork, challenges, and innovation.

Did you know that roughly 65% of people have some degree of curl in their hair, be it loose waves, spirals, or tight coils? If you don’t have curly hair you might not know how challenging it can be to manage and maintain those beautiful locks of curls—frizz, dryness, damage, and difficulty detangling can be a daily struggle.

We invite you to a behind-the-scenes look at how we partnered with Sequoyah Glenn, founder of 924 CoOp Consultants, and Statistical Expert Tom Rosholt to combine empathy, human-centered design, and data to build winning product and go-to-market strategies is already earning industry accolades and we are so proud of the work we did together to create better solutions for curly haircare. 

You’ve Got a Great Idea… How to Break Through the Noise

Above all else, our goal was to deeply understand the routines, struggles, and underserved needs of individuals caring for curly, textured hair. From there, we investigated the intersection between Delta’s expertise in understanding water and the consumers’ haircare needs. The haircare industry is highly competitive, with well-established brands that already dominate in terms of trust, marketing power, and customer loyalty. If Delta were to bring an offering to market, our goal was to do so authentically and remain true to the people we aimed to help.

There are several key elements that we needed to understand before we could create a strategy to rise in the haircare world. Delta’s core challenges:

• • • Understand Consumer Behavior: Fully understand the routines, challenges, and hair care tasks among those with curly hair.
      
    • Market Sizing: Determine the size of the curly-haired market and understand what motivates individuals to engage with new hair care tools.
      
    • Product Usage: Gain insights into how users might utilize the tool and what benefits VersaCurl delivers in real-life scenarios.
      
    • Effective Messaging: Identify relevant and meaningful messages that resonate with the target audience.
      
    • Product Pricing Strategy: Develop a data-driven pricing strategy that allows for a confident product launch.

For Delta, these steps were critical for successfully introducing a new product to a crowded and competitive industry.

Authenticity Through Listening and Learning

VersaCurl is specifically designed to address the needs of textured hair, which is most commonly found in Black and Hispanic communities. Recognizing the importance of cultural relevance, we assembled a team with diverse cultural, research, and industry backgrounds to guide the development of the tool and go-to-market strategy.

Our approach fostered deep empathy-building, helping Delta understand the lives, needs, and reactions of key consumer groups. Sessions provided valuable insights on how Delta could communicate in this new category among distinct cultural segments, ensuring the product’s authenticity while accounting for nuances rooted in consumer behaviors and needs. 

The Final Push: Getting the Price Right

A cornerstone of the go-to-market (GTM) strategy—the pricing research needed to be rooted in accuracy and reliability while retaining speed to accommodate internal product decision-making timelines.

Catapult worked with Tom Rosholt to design a Gabor-Granger pricing analysis to guide Delta on the pricing for this new-to-company product. Optimal price points were uncovered, but after a successful readout of the results, Delta and Catapult challenged themselves to get the pricing just right, because creating a new product in a new category comes with unique challenges and considerations.

Building from a base of data and findings, we wanted to ensure Delta’s VersaCurl would be available in the right channels and at a price that accurately reflected its value to haircare routines. To do this, Catapult conducted a tactical follow-up pricing study using a monadic design to assess price receptivity while minimizing anchoring bias. The findings from this study were analyzed alongside data from the initial research, creating a triangulated, data-driven pricing strategy that inspired confidence and aligned with the tool’s value proposition.

“From start to finish, partnering with Catapult and 924 CoOp to learn more about textured hair care has been an amazing experience. I felt listened to. I felt challenged. And now, I feel empowered to make the right decisions.”

– Kyle Duffy, Innovation Marketing Manager

“The addition of both Catapult and 924 into our DFC teams was indeed seamless; the larger team quickly “normed” such that all voices and opinions were readily accepted and heard. Which ultimately led to very timely acquisition of needed research results, meeting our stakeholders’ needs.”

– Tom Gospel, Senior Product Manager, B!G Innovation Lab

The Takeaway

This case study provides a blueprint for using qualitative research to inform product development, quantitative pricing strategies, and cultural empathy in marketing. The integration of empathy-driven focus groups, cultural insights, home usage test (HUT), ethnographic approaches, and rigorous pricing analysis highlights the importance of a multi-layered approach in delivering products that meet consumer needs and succeed in competitive markets.

From a broader perspective, this project evolved over more than 10 distinct research engagements with Delta, each building toward a comprehensive understanding of the market and consumer needs. This article highlights a few cornerstone moments along the way, offering key takeaways from the journey.

For market researchers, this project underscores the value of collaboration, iteration, and the application of both soft and hard data in making informed, consumer-centric decisions.

By combining deep consumer understanding with precise, data-driven strategies, Delta’s launch of its VersaCurl is a multifaceted example of how to develop a product that fills a market gap and creates lasting consumer connections.

If you’re interested in broader best practices for developing go-to-market strategies, we invite you to reach out to us for a deeper discussion.

THE CATAPULT TEAM 

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