Not in theory, or in a manifesto tucked behind a hamburger menu, but in practice — in the hands of customers, in the weave of a T-shirt, in the flicker of a digital screen. H&M, a name synonymous with global fashion at scale, found itself once more at the intersection of accessibility and accountability. The world had changed. Consumers were no longer just buying garments; they were buying stories, values, and futures. And so, the brand asked: how do we design not just for people, but with them — with their concerns, their aspirations, their contradictions?

We began with context. Before designing anything, we needed to understand the gap between how the brand perceived itself and how it was actually experienced. We mapped the customer journey — not the theoretical one on slides, but the lived one. From scrolling the homepage on a slow connection to standing in a changing room under fluorescent light, unsure whether to commit. Using a mix of moderated interviews and diary studies, we followed participants over the course of three weeks: watching, listening, logging their behaviour, asking them to reflect in their own words. We didn’t start with personas — we let the stories surface first, then looked for patterns. What emerged wasn’t a segment, but a tension: the simultaneous desire for novelty and meaning. Fast fashion wasn’t the villain. Disconnection was.

Fieldwork unfolded across four countries. In Paris, a young woman compared fashion to dating apps — “fast, tempting, exhausting.” In Stockholm, a man in his sixties recalled how his mother used to mend clothes, how he wished he’d learned. In Barcelona, teenagers spoke about TikTok microtrends with the fluency of cultural anthropologists. In Berlin, one participant said something that echoed throughout the entire process: “I want to buy less, but the interface keeps pushing more.” It wasn’t just about what people wore — it was about how they made decisions, and the systems influencing those decisions.

With foundational insights in hand, we moved into synthesis. We held a series of affinity mapping sessions, clustering observations around emotional drivers, moments of friction, and missed opportunities. Using a jobs-to-be-done framework, we reframed what H&M was offering: not just clothing, but confidence, adaptability, social belonging, and increasingly, moral alignment. Our hypothesis was clear — users didn’t want to be told to behave sustainably; they wanted tools that made it easier to choose well without feeling overwhelmed or patronised.

Prototypes followed, but we were deliberate in resisting the polish of high-fidelity too soon. We sketched flows on paper, ran co-design sessions with users, and invited critique early. In one workshop, a participant gently tore apart our proposed recycling widget. “This isn’t inviting,” she said. “It looks like guilt in a box.” She was right. So we redesigned it not as a transaction, but as a ritual — simple language, human tone, tactile cues. We tested this revised concept in-store with real users. Dwell time increased. More interestingly, people started asking staff questions about what happened next. It became a conversation, not a container.

Digital touchpoints were reimagined with similar care. One team explored the taxonomy of the app, mapping how categories, filters, and recommendations were experienced — not just logically, but emotionally. We found that people wanted curation without feeling manipulated. So we built a prototype that paired editorial storytelling with real-time availability: imagine reading about the origin of organic cotton and immediately seeing which items in your wishlist contained it. This prototype was A/B tested over a three-week period. The control group saw the standard grid. The test group saw the editorial layer. Engagement went up by 23 percent. More importantly, qualitative feedback suggested that people felt more informed, more aligned. “It feels like the app is thinking with me,” one user wrote.

Store pilots became our reality check. In selected locations, we tested a new customer flow that centred around circularity — from clearer signage and staff training to shelf-level prompts that asked simple, personal questions: “Will you wear this more than 30 times?” Some found it intrusive. Others said it made them pause. Sales didn’t drop — they shifted. More basics were purchased. Fewer impulse items. We analysed return rates and found they dropped by 9 percent in pilot stores. But the data only told part of the story. What stayed with us was the woman who stood in front of a mirror, turned to her friend, and said, “I feel like I’m choosing better.”

Midway through the project, we returned to our initial journey maps and rewrote them — not as blueprints, but as narratives. We layered them with emotional highs and lows, user quotes, and system dependencies. These became artefacts for internal alignment, used in stakeholder meetings to ensure that what we were building still answered the original question: not just how do we design better products, but how do we foster better relationships? A brand is not a monologue. It’s a mirror.

There were tensions, of course. Trade-offs between business KPIs and ethical nudges. Conflicts between global consistency and local nuance. We documented these dilemmas as part of our research process, not as footnotes, but as integral parts of the system. The truth is, UX research at scale rarely produces clean answers. It produces choices — informed, uncomfortable, consequential choices. We made them visible.

By the end of the quarter, there were results. The recycling programme saw a 15 percent increase in participation. Session duration on the app rose by 18 percent among users who interacted with the new content model. Customer satisfaction scores improved, particularly around store staff knowledge and app usability. But the most telling metric came from our open feedback field: “It feels like H&M is listening — not just selling.”

The work continues. Some features were scaled across markets. Others were archived. A few were intentionally left as prototypes — provocations for future teams. What mattered most wasn’t the longevity of any one output, but the evolution of mindset: from solving in isolation to building in relationship. From designing for to designing with.

One scene keeps coming back. A store in Gothenburg. A teenager stands at the recycling bin, holding a worn denim jacket. She hesitates, then places it in the slot. On the screen beside her, a short video begins — not flashy, just a quiet voiceover explaining how the fibres will be reused, how nothing is lost. She watches. She smiles. She turns and walks away. Behind her, the story continues.

And so does the work. Research isn’t a phase. It’s a stance. A willingness to be surprised. A commitment to looking again. What H&M learned — what we all learned — is that responsible design doesn’t start with answers. It starts with attention. The kind that listens before it speaks. The kind that stays long after the project ends.