Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that puts the customer’s real behaviour at the centre of designing a product, service, or experience. It moves through a loop — understand the person, frame the right problem, generate ideas, prototype, and test — rather than starting from a solution and looking for a market.
The phrase is often used loosely, as a synonym for “workshops with sticky notes.” Used well, it is something stricter: a discipline of not designing for the customer you imagine, but for the customer you have observed. That is why the first phase of any honest design-thinking process is research, not ideation — and why it sits naturally alongside ethnography.
For a D2C or digital-first team, design thinking is most useful when a product decision keeps stalling because nobody agrees on what the customer actually needs. Grounding the conversation in field evidence — what people do, where they struggle, what they work around — turns an opinion fight into a design problem with a testable answer.
Avant Amour does not run design-thinking theatre. We supply the part most teams skip: the behavioural evidence that makes the ideation and prototyping phases land on the right problem in the first place.
Related: Ethnography, Co-Creation, Jobs-to-be-Done.