Studio Leoht — Innovation workshop

Franco-British consumer research & Innovation Studio · Lyon

Understand consumers
to power product design & strategy.

Behind every customer is a life: daily rituals, cultural norms, unspoken expectations. Closing the gap between your product offering and how people actually live is where real engagement and satisfaction begins.

We combine rigorous user-focused research methodologies and agile business acumen : delivering 360° alignment across stakeholders, product trio and marketing team.

14
Years of experience
10
Years in London

About

Studio Lēoht

Sophie Brand, Founder of Studio Lēoht

Crédit Photo : www.marielandoin.fr

Founded and led by Sophie Brand, a senior user researcher and digital consumer experience strategist with 14 years' international experience across healthcare, the GAFAM, and R&D centres. She led end-to-end consumer research from discovery through to go-to-market strategy, including digital marketing strategy.

Working alongside her: an international network of multi-disciplinary researchers, fieldwork providers & designers — with extensive experience across product development, brand strategy, advertising, content marketing (B2B & B2C), market research, and other creative fields.

01
Full-spectrum
Foundational research, cultural fieldwork, UX research — augmented by ideation facilitation, rapid prototyping, and AI-powered analysis.
02
Customer-focused
Research anchored in real human behaviour — not assumptions. We go where the customer is.
03
Value-driven
Every insight connected to a business outcome. Strategy and research in the same room, not in sequence.
04
Purpose-led
Social impact and responsible innovation built into the brief — not bolted on at the end.

Services

Six ways to work together.

Each service built around the same principle: understand first, build second.

01
Product strategy & business alignment
In an AI-driven market, copying the competition is a slow death.Real differentiation lives in insight — spotting white spaces others miss, building positioning that holds across the full range of user needs, and developing go-to-market strategies in genuine partnership with product teams. Not just a product. A value-driven ecosystem of services that actually improves people's lives.
Strategy
02
Product discovery & marketing
End-to-end consumer research, from the first question to launch day.User-centred products built better and faster — because the right insight reaches the right team at the right moment. Translated into visual artefacts, prototypes and recommendations that accelerate consensus and remove the guesswork. A research practice shaped around the realities of agile development.
Discovery · Research
03
On-demand ideation sessions
When teams are stuck, the answer is rarely more meetings.Co-creation workshops, design sprints and rapid prototyping sessions — custom-built, deployed fast, designed to cut through noise and reach insight. Structured enough to move quickly. Open enough to surface what no one expected. Check-out our innovation room case study
Facilitation
04
French RSE meets Anglo-Saxon social innovation
French RSE manages impact. Anglo-Saxon social innovation engineers it.We bring the second posture into the first context — systemic, proactive, grounded in real problem exploration. Design and strategy that aligns business objectives with the ecological, social and individual shifts that can no longer be treated as externalities.
Social Innovation
05
DON'T LOOK UP
A workshop on why good solutions fail — and how to design ones that actually land.Smart people. Good data. Right answer. Nobody moves. The problem isn't the solution — it's the invisible social rules no one mapped. Norm design surfaces what fieldwork reveals and rational thinking misses, then shows how to design with the grain of a culture, not against it.
Strategic urgency
06
Futures thinking & prospective design
Futures thinking isn't optimism. It's the discipline of not being surprised.We are living through overlapping crises — economic, environmental, geopolitical, social, technological. Prospective design maps multiple scenarios, surfaces what's coming before it arrives, and feeds directly into RSE, product and innovation pipelines. So organisations can act on what they can shape — and meet what they can't with something better than shock.
Prospective

Portfolio

Representative case studies.
Our hero methodologies.

Research that precedes the wireframe. Strategy that outlasts the sprint.

Case Study · FoodTech
From novelty to rituals
An interview with a food anthropologist changed the brief. The retention issue wasn't about novelty — it was about ritual. Customer diaries revealed the emotional relationship to food the app had been missing. The insight didn't need building. It needed uncovering.
Diary study Flywheel
View case
Case Study · E-commerce
A shopping companion
Mental workload doesn't reveal itself in interviews — it surfaces at 11pm, alone, in front of a website that doesn't work. Research kits and mobile ethnography caught those unguarded moments. The insight: one companion to centralise help and reduce the load.
Cultural probe Co-design
Case study coming soon
Case Study · Stressful Location
Mindful medical center
For most, medical centers can be stressful environments. A boardgame brought health staff, patients and caregivers into the same room. What they built together: an app offering mental health support, life skills and business education — open to all who walk in.
Serious game Service design
Case study coming soon
Methodology · Secondary Research
Foundational research: what you need to know before you know what to build.
"The most expensive mistake in product discovery isn't a bad design. It's solving the wrong problem with a value proposition no one asked for."
Cultural analysis Anthropology Psychology
View methodology
Methodology · Marketing
Branding & product development: do your homework
Learning brand strategy first trained me to ask the right questions before a single brief is written: who are we building for, what are we promising, and does the product actually deliver it? That foundation is what keeps product development honest.
Methodology · Workshop Facilitation
The Immersion Lab: reduce time-to-insight & build consensus
We create and facilitate walk-in innovation rooms where your team can immerse themselves with the cultures, customers' needs and brands possibilities in a minimum of time for a maximum of impact.

Recommendations

What our clients say.

"Likeable, warm and emotionally intelligent, Sophie is a talented cultural detective with an ability to sift through huge swathes of information and spot what others might overlook. She can take small shoots and nurture them into persuasive insight. Too often, people jump erratically from gimmick to gimmick failing to notice the deeper cultural shifts. Refreshingly Sophie is able to spot the woods, not simply the trees. Always clutching a fresh batch of research, magazines and books, highlighter in hand."
Sam Shaw
Strategy Director, Canvas8
"Sophie is a brilliant researcher and strategist. She has a unique ability to transition from insights to actionable recommendations. Sophie is equally capable of uncovering small (important) details and the big picture. With experience in qualitative research, innovation and brand strategy Sophie adds extra brainpower to almost any project. Above all, Sophie is a pleasure to work with and a fantastic communicator. I would highly recommend Sophie to any company that wants to take insights and strategic capabilities to the next level."
Kian Bakhtiari
Founder, The People
"J'ai pu collaborer avec Sophie sur notre stratégie d'accompagnement de nos clients en amont de nos prestations d'ingénieries. Compréhension de marchés, stratégies de croissance, design thinking, recherches et analyses de données, animations de workshop. Sophie est vive et percutante, elle a beaucoup d'énergie et se donne à 150% lors de ses interventions. Un plaisir d'avoir partagé un bout de chemin ensemble !"
Adrien Desportes
Ex-CEO, Rtone

Skillset

Research made for
agile product development.

View methodology →
Discover
Foundational research
Anthropology, psychology, sociology, data, press. The context neither users nor the market can give you.
Immerse
User research
Ethnography, diary studies, cultural probes, extreme users, focus groups. Real behaviours in real contexts.
Synthesise
Innovation room
Walk-in rooms that spatialise research so teams spend their time thinking, not catching up.
Activate
Design sprint
Prototypes, A/B testing, validation — from insight to product direction, fast.

Let's work together

Ready when you are.

Based in Lyon. Working across France and the UK. Open to full-time roles, consulting mandates, and project-based engagements.

sophie@studioleoht.com