What happens when you do everything right and the numbers still don't cooperate? That's the question at the heart of this IIEX North America presentation from Steve Beckman, co-founder of Designology, and Paige Hansen, founder of BAM Buckwheat Milk — a brand built around America's first plant-based milk made from buckwheat.
Paige's story is a compelling one. A mission-driven founder with a genuinely differentiated product, early retail wins including acceptance into the Whole Foods Market local and emerging accelerator program, and even a Shark Tank appearance — and yet the sales velocity simply wasn't there. Rather than quit, she called Steve and asked for help looking at the brand through a different lens. That decision set in motion one of the most honest and instructive case studies in recent CPG memory.
The Designology team deployed a lighter, more iterative version of their PIVOT consumer insights platform — purpose-built for exactly this kind of scrappy, fast-moving brand challenge. They ran three rapid rounds of testing, probing price sensitivity, on-pack communication, and overall design. The shopping metrics were humbling. The category captains held their ground. Some of Designology's proposed changes actually boosted competitor numbers. On paper, it looked like a dead end.
But the real story was hiding in the behavioral data — specifically in the open-ended comments that consumers left along the way. Shoppers weren't just answering the questions being asked. They were volunteering something more valuable: confusion about what buckwheat is, doubt about what it would taste like, and a need for a reason to believe in a crowded category. A single line of on-pack copy — "climate smart superfood" — became the thread that started to unravel the whole problem.
Even with an improved design co-created with consumer input, one final challenge emerged that felt, as Paige put it, insurmountable: the brand itself. PIVOT surfaced it through an unconventional test — placing buckwheat milk under a category captain's brand to see what would happen. The results were unambiguous. Brand recognition and trust were the missing ingredient, not product, price, or packaging.
Faced with a fork in the road, Paige made the move that defined the outcome. She reached out to a competitor brand she'd been paired with in the Whole Foods accelerator and asked the question that scared her most. The answer changed everything. Buckwheat milk is coming back — this time under New Barn Organics, a national brand with the distribution, trust, and reach to give the product the platform it deserves.
The takeaways from Steve and Paige are as practical as they are honest. Data is a partner, not the CEO — it cannot replace intuition or mission. The story isn't always where you expect to find it; sometimes it lives in the anomalies, not the patterns. And most importantly — test the ideas that make the entire room nervous. In a test-and-learn environment, any idea you don't test is learning you'll never get.
Watch the full talk here
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