Designing The Peacock Leggings – Behind The Scenes

The arrival of the Proud Peacock is finally upon on. It’s been almost 3 months since the original first look and even longer since we began testing. But wait no more! The release is happening February 21st at 9:45AM EST.

Many of CVG’s designs are crowd-sourced (sourcing ideas and concepts from fans) by our community, but this release took it to the next level. Almost every aspect of The Proud Peacock design was built by you!

The First Look

The first look at this design began all the way back to Black Friday when we sent out a FB message to subscribers asking what they thought of the design.

The results of the poll were clear, they were loved! In fact, 10,502 voted that they loved them.

Immediately the requests started to pour in for Peacock Shorts. It wasn’t long until there were enough requests to make it happen.
So just like that, boom, done! The decision for shorts was made. 🙌

But that wasn’t the only request that we were hearing repeatedly. Many people had some certain (not so good) feels about the the black stitching.

Making Them Perfect

If you’ve been following CVG for long enough you know that we obsess about every item we put out. Anything less than perfect isn’t acceptable. This is why we spend months testing every product. Things at the top of the list include making sure leggings don’t turn see through when squatting and that they don’t show sweat. Your workouts are difficult enough, we know you shouldn’t have another obstacle to overcome while getting through that round of burpees or finishing that last squat rep.

Making this design perfect involved more than the practical sense. For this design we needed to adjust the stitching color. The feedback was that the black stitching was a little too distracting from the pattern. Personally, I liked the stitching a lot. But there’s a saying that we often use at CVG “We don’t run CVG, our customers do!” So we went back to the drawing board based on your recommendations, and we’re so glad we did!

The next stitching attempt was green. The thought was to draw out the green in the leggings. The photo below shows the side by side comparison of the green stitching vs the black stitching. Notice how the different stitching colors draw out different colors in the pattern.

A quick poll throughout our office told us that green was a big thumbs down. 👎👎👎

Black stitching was looking like the winner until we gave it one more try. Next we tried blue-ish/teal stitching.

😍😍😍😍😍😍

After seeing this the decision was easy. Even though I was a fan of the black to begin with I was 100% won over by this color.

We’re certainly glad we kept our ear to the ground on what our community had to say. This was absolutely the right move!

The Sports Bra That Never Was

It wouldn’t be a true behind-the-scenes unless we put it all out there for you. So here it is…

At the beginning stages there was a potential for a bra. We tossed around idea for a bra with the printed peacock pattern and also a solid green bra. Here’s a few looks at the pattern.

Every decision we make on new products involves a lot of factors that may not always be obvious to most people. One major factor is space for inventory. Each new product requires a lot of space on shelves and space for boxes. When you take into consideration all the variations that come into play with a new design, space fills up quickly…

• Sizes for XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL
• Full Length Leggings
• Capri Length Leggings
• Shorts with 2.5 inch inseam
• Shorts with 5 inch insteam
• 😰😰😰

These are the things that literally keep Josh (our warehouse manager) up at night.

After much discussion the decision was unanimous. We decided against this bra. The final nail in the coffin on this bra was that our Bombshell Blue Bra actually matched the Peacock Leggings perfectly. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

Naming The Design

Just like we crowd-source our community for thoughts on designs, we will sometimes also poll for naming the products. We don’t always do this. Sometimes we’re able to come up with the perfect name ourselves. For instance the Love Thighself Leggings/Shorts (almost sold out) was named by our team and we loved it. However, for this design we were stumped. So we decided to ask 53,000 people for help and the person who suggested the winning name would win the leggings or shorts for free!

Asking this many people for help is a great thing, but it can also be a bit overwhelming. Reading 2,400 comments takes time when each suggestion is thought long and hard about. Sometimes there’s a clear winner, sometimes there’s several that stand out.

This time around we ended up with a list of about 10. I went around the office with the list asking each employee. Every person picked something different, no one agreed. 🤔

We have too many Type 1 personalities (perfectionists, according to the Enneagram) at the office, so it’s difficult for us to just settle for anything less than perfect. So we had to take the polling 1 step further. We setup some FB ads with the narrowed down top 10 and asked for votes.

The winner based on votes ended up being Rachael’s and Ben’s favorite, Proud Peacock!

There were many suggestion for this name within the 2,400 comments so we had to find the first person to suggest it. That person was RoSalie N Crain. 🎉 Congrats!

The Time Is Now

As you can see, a lot of work goes into 1 design. But we know that’s what separates us from the rest.

The same can be said for The Black Moto Capris, that will also go live this Friday along side the Proud Peacock design. The Motos have been a staple for CVG for some time now. However, until now they have only been available as full length. We wouldn’t be doing our job if we weren’t listening to your requests. Which is why the Moto Capris have come to life.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this behind the scenes look into creating a new release. Keep your eyes open for what may be coming next!