Leveraging AI to amplify and speed up the creative process

Designing next-generation performance gear demands more than just innovation – it demands speed, precision, and creativity working in unison.

When designing high-performance sports products, the brief is generally ambitious: enhance safety, functionality, comfort, and aesthetic appeal while reducing time-to-market. For us, this is the perfect opportunity to let AI augment human ingenuity and tackle complexity at speed.

Traditionally, creating such a product would involve lengthy research phases and numerous design loops, often stretching across months. The complexity of safety standards, ergonomics, materials, and brand identity slows down traditional innovation processes.

Our challenge was clear: deliver a fully validated, high-performance helmet concept in just seven days without compromising on creativity, function, or brand alignment.

We began by framing the challenge through the Manyone Radar, mapping trends, market gaps, and emerging technologies. This data-driven clarity helped pinpoint the opportunities for differentiation and served as a foundation for our creative exploration.

With this foundation in place, we launched a REAL AI design sprint – our methodology for ideating at the speed of thought. By pairing our designers with generative AI, we produced hundreds of viable helmet concepts in just hours. With rapid validation loops built in, we identified leading concepts and moved directly into agile development.

As a result of our agile process, we developed a new typology of helmets in a fraction of the standard time.

In just one week, we delivered test-ready concepts ready to move forward to the prototype phase. This concept pushes beyond standard configurations, setting a new normal for innovation timelines in the industry while simultaneously expanding creative reach and reducing risk by shortening testing cycles.