The Female Race Designing For Women in Outdoor Sports

The Femme Den, a grassroots movement within Smart Design that specializes in designing products for women, will deliver a presentation in partnership with Teva at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Show in Salt Lake City, Utah.  The session titled The Female Race: Designing For Women in Outdoor Sports is scheduled on January 24th from 11:00 AM to Noon.

Sports products for women do not always take into account fundamental gender differences. Although the athletic industry has recognized the women’s market to be a significant opportunity, they are having difficulty properly designing for this segment. For example, why can’t helmets and ponytails work together? Can’t ski bindings be redesigned so that there are not 9 times as many ACL tears for females? And, if you are a woman, why do you always need to be cold in your winter sleeping bag? Men and women have different physical builds, different psychological needs, different attitudes towards sport and fitness, and different lifecycles.

Yvonne Lin, Senior Innovation Engineer at Smart Design and a founding member of the Femme Den, along with Whitney Hopkins, Design Engineer and member of Femme Den, will be discussing these differences since they are vitally important for the successful design of women’s outdoor and sporting products.  The Femme Den has developed five guidelines that help designers understand women’s needs better. Yvonne and Whitney will demonstrate how to apply these guidelines to help designers and engineers develop sports products that women appreciate.

Yvonne explains, “Many companies try to appeal to women by ’shrinking and pinking’ male-oriented products. Little is designed for women that doesn’t fit this one-dimensional mould - and this is the basis for our five principle guidelines that can help designers ’connect’ with women and make the design changes that are necessary to satisfy the unmet needs of women consumers.”

Smart Design’s Femme Den presentation, The Female Race: Designing For Women in Outdoor Sports, is sponsored by Teva and will be held in the Salt Lake City Marriott Downtown, Salons B-C , on Saturday 24th from 11:00 AM to Noon.

The Outdoor Retailer Winter Show takes place on January 22nd to 25th, 2009 at Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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