1. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
Once they started paying attention to the rollator market, Berggreen and Nørmark quickly realized where it was falling short.
“It was obvious that this industry had a lack of design,” Berggreen explains. “We very quickly found out that was because the way [the existing companies] looked at users was as patients, not people with hopes and dreams.”
Top tip
To find out what is most important to your customers, just ask them. Berggreen and his team took to the streets and asked people what they ideally wanted from a mobility device, or what they liked and disliked about the rollator they currently owned. “Then they opened up,” says Berggreen. “That discussion grew, and [we became] able to paint a picture of what was needed.”
Berggreen and Nørmark saw there was a market for a rollator designed for consumers who needed mobility aids but still wanted to travel, go out with family and friends and generally live an active life. “We simply took age out of the equation,” he explains.
2. Look outside the industry for design inspiration
Rather than looking at existing rollator designs and finding ways to improve them, the byACRE team took a different approach to designing their prototype. Berggreen explains that he wanted byAcre’s rollator to communicate “activeness”, so, as a starting point, he filled a wall with pictures of things that had an active appearance, from sharks and eagles to sports cars and fighter jets.
“When you looked at the wall you could see this organic shape, so we thought that we had to create something that had this organic shape. That’s how the design emerged,” he explains. “It was a very good process; I could sit there with my engineers and say, ‘is it active?’”
Top tip
“When redesigning a product, don’t listen to the trade,” advises Berggreen. “Or if you do, remember there’s a lot of bias.” He explains how, in byACRE’s early days, retailers regularly told him that consumers weren’t interested in the type of product he was showing or wouldn’t be prepared to buy the product at the suggested price point, which was the opposite of what the team was hearing from consumers. “If you want to innovate, doing it together with the trade is difficult, almost impossible. You can deal with the trade later,” he says.
3. Find and nurture your early adopters
While a large proportion of customers that need a mobility device are older people, the byACRE team realized their products were also becoming popular with a younger and social media-savvy demographic, too.
But developing a strong online presence was always an important part of byACRE’s strategy. “Buying a rollator is a very big decision and it’s very private. Our theory was that people would start doing their research on the net,” he says.
Berggreen says that disability advocates and bloggers who post pictures of themselves going about their lives with their byACRE rollators have been among the company’s most important ambassadors, with their enthusiasm for the brand helping to spread the word.
Building the byACRE name this way translated into real-world demand, too, with customers asking in stores for products they’d seen online, Berggreen says. “Then it started to spread.”
Top tip
When launching a disruptive product, Berggreen says, “just be extremely persistent”. Winning over core consumers early on helped the byACRE team to convince retailers to stock their rollators.
Source: FedEx – byACRE: Three lessons from disrupting an industry – April 2022
