CÉCILE
PRODUCT ENGINEER
AT DECATHLON | NABAIJI

I design products, mainly swimwear but also some sun protection products. My aim is to abide by the trinity: cost, quality, lead time; to which we can now also add environmental impact.

There are several phases in product design:
- Transcribing what the Product Manager tells me, i.e., their product brief, which emerges from a user need. For example, their brief might be "I need to dress children aged 6 months to 2 years; I need a product that dries quickly and is easy to get on and off". My objective will then be to convert these needs into technical characteristics. I then move on to the research phase.
- At the same time, I collaborate with the Product Manager, Pattern Makers and Designers who work on the product drawings.
- Technical feasibility is then assessed by a prototyping phase followed by tests. We then agree together on which solutions we will choose for our product.
- Then comes another test phase: large-scale testing. The goal is to perform these tests at an industrial scale and then draw up specifications. If, in production, they are able to recreate what we have done but on a large scale, then this means that the specifications are good to go and can be approved. It is very important to have a product suitable for large-scale manufacturing because these specifications, once approved, will be used and replicated by other countries.
- We can then move on to the design of the product! We develop the colours, the graphics, the shape. When we move to this phase, the "aesthetic" phase, the components of the product have already been determined and will not change.

The challenge is to manage to do all this while following all the regulations. Our aim is for the final product to be made available to as many users as possible, anywhere in the world. Since each country has its own regulations, we must ensure that our product complies with as many of these restrictions as possible.

There would be no product!
The product would not be approved. From a manufacturing perspective, the product would be difficult to replicate. There would be no in-depth study of each parameter of the product. We would no longer have control over costs or quality, etc.

Everywhere! That's what I love about being a Product Engineer: we are there from start to finish. So I'm there at the very beginning, during the brief, and it's also me who gives the green light to launch production at the end of the development cycle.

I subject the product to the toughest tests possible and imaginable in order to approve it (especially with Joey the Field Test Engineer)! It is my responsibility to set the quality requirements of the product.

I am mainly motivated by:
- Customer reviews.
- CO2 impact versus the turnover of our products (such as the number of eco-designed products within a scope, for example).
- Product return rate, and therefore the rate of customer dissatisfaction with the product.

I am in daily contact with the people in charge of production. I also work with my project group every day, i.e. the team made up of Product Managers, Designers, Pattern Makers and Supply Managers.

The thing I love the most is interacting with people and designing products together. I wouldn't want to do it on my own.

I trained as a textile engineer. So I wanted to do a job related to textiles. I was also a swimmer, so I said to myself: why not do both! When I saw that there was an opening here, I met the right people and seized the opportunity. Funnily enough, I always used to say "if I don't know what to do with my life, I'm a textile engineer, I could always design swimsuits". And now it's my job!