Designing Inclusive Offerings

The trend toward inclusivity in product and service design—ensuring equal access to, or benefit from, products and services—has gained significant attention in industries such as beauty, wellness, and fashion. However, to our knowledge, there is currently no rigorous definition of inclusivity in the product line design or assortment optimization literature. This paper addresses the need for rigorous models, frameworks, and methods to create inclusive product lines and to measure the inclusivity of existing ones. We introduce the first formal definition of inclusive offerings and propose two continuous measures of inclusivity. We then formulate the inclusive offering design problem, which aims to select a minimum-cardinality set of offerings from a continuous feature space to ensure suitability for all users. Despite its NP-hardness, we present an optimal algorithm for realistic settings and one-dimensional feature spaces. Additionally, we explore the inclusivity resulting from offerings designed to maximize profit, revealing a nonmonotone relationship between inclusivity and the diversity of the user population. Our methods and metrics are applied to the foundation lines of eleven leading makeup brands, demonstrating their practical relevance and impact to the inclusive beauty movement.

This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, operations management.

Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06742.