(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) This is the first innovative pushchair brand in
20 years, the first new brand of pushchair
that we're going to stop.
I think we spent £126,000 with a
branding company and it just bombs.
Phil Staunton has spent 20 years in physical
product development.
He built D2M product design from a back
bedroom into one of the UK's most active
product design consultancies.
Over 1,600 projects shipped.
He also made his own hardware product, raised
three quarters of a million pounds, got it
into John Lewis and had the head buyer
tell him it was the first innovative new
pushchair brand in 20 years.
Phil's pushchair had more engineered features than anything
else in John Lewis.
His bill of materials was double what Bugaloo
was spending.
He got it into 11 stores.
He had buyers across Europe in the room.
And between his first batch and his second,
he made 42 engineering changes.
Our first batch of products, we made 400
units.
We then made 42 changes before we ordered
our second batch of products.
We had to order it really quickly because
of the John Lewis stocking requirements and whatever
else.
I don't believe that any one of those
42 changes any of our customers noticed.
And then we get to part the story
that Phil says has an easy answer and
a harder one.
Yeah, it's an easy answer and there's a
harder answer.
This episode is about the gap between design
excellence and commercial reality, about what happens when
a product earns the best possible validation from
the market and still runs into the hardest
possible truth.
We put all this design effort in.
We had all these patented features.
And customers genuinely would just buy product because
of the color or who they'd seen pushing
it because their neighbor had one or whatever
else.
And as a product designer, that was just
devastating.
This is Why Design.
Phil Staunton, welcome to Why Design.
Thanks for being on the show.
No problem at all.
Pleasure to be here, Chris.
Thanks for having me.
We've been talking about this for some time
now.
And we've finally, it seems like months and
months later, here we are.
It's nearly a year since we first said
we should do this.
Yeah, it has been a year like that,
though.
So it's finally great to take it down.
I'm stood up today for a change.
But let's dive in, shall we?
So Phil, you've spent the last 20 years
or so in physical product development.
You've built and grown D2M into one of
the UK's best known product design consultancies, shipping
over 1,600 projects.
And you've built your own hardware brands that
landed in John Lewis.
But before we dive into your background in
too much detail, let's go back to a
moment where everything shifted.
You're standing in John Lewis, Oxford Street, with
your pushchair brand on the shop floor.
What's the exact moment you realized you've actually
pulled this off?
Yeah, I think the exact moment was probably
about two months before that, when we sat
in Victoria at John Lewis headquarters with the
head buyer for Nursery, one of her team,
and she was like, yeah, this is the
first innovative pushchair brand in 20 years, the
first new brand of pushchair that we're going
to stock.
And we're excited to do so.
We want to build that launch campaign with
you.
We want to do a big rooftop party
on Oxford Street stores, part of the launch
and everything else.
And I think coming out of that meeting
with my team was just like, oh my
goodness, we've actually landed this.
And this doesn't happen.
New brands do not get into John Lewis.
New brands and pushchairs definitely don't get in.
So, yeah, we were over the moon.
And I really couldn't believe it at that
point at all.
What made you decide to innovate in pushchairs
then?
And how many other brands did you have
to pitch before John Lewis said yes?
I was for good questions in that.
So, we picked pushchairs because we'd already done
a couple of pushchairs.
We had good manufacturing contacts out in China
as a result of a couple of client
projects we'd done in this space already.
We'd also done some golf trolleys, so we
could really see the similarity.
We built up some real expertise in terms
of wheeled push products.
I just wish that was a bigger category,
but there we go.
And we thought, it's about time we put
our money where our mouth is.
But it's also a hugely commercial decision, so
I don't mind sharing candidly with you and
your listeners.
Product design agency is tough, right?
It's constantly kind of famine or feast.
You're constantly trying to keep the team, particularly
if you're an agency that's reasonable size.
As we were at the time, we were
18 people at the time.
Trying to keep 10, 12 designers constantly fed
with work is really hard.
And we're like, what we need here is
a different revenue line.
We need something that actually we can scale.
We need something that is not just going
to be this kind of rollercoaster.
And that's why we decided to develop our
own products at all in the first place.
And then, as I say, push chairs, because
we had some experience there.
Also, genuinely, I was really interested in designing
push chairs.
They are not easy, and I don't like
easy product design.
We've always done technically complex stuff.
There's mechanics in there in terms of the
folding mechanisms.
There's textiles, and we've got a textile team
at D2M.
So integrated textiles and hard goods we're really
good at.
There's metal work, there's plastic work, wheels, bearings,
all that stuff that I can get excited
about as a kind of technical, functional product
designer, basically.
So yeah, that was all the reasoning.
And I can't remember the second half of
your question now, Chris.
Oh, it was how many brands did you
have to pitch to, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, we did a couple of consumer shows,
and we pitched to some of the smaller,
independent retailers before then to kind of cut
our teeth and learn what it was like
to pitch in front of a buyer, kind
of get our answers down to kind of
standard questions, make sure we could supply good,
ready answers and actually we were ready to
supply John Lewis.
And actually when it came to it, we
weren't.
But we thought we were at that point,
having done a few independents.
So we were probably in about six small
stores.
We've probably done something like kind of three
or four consumer shows by that point.
And yeah, so that was the time we
thought, okay, you know, let's go for this.
And was it your own branded product, or
did you kind of white label it and
brand it?
Mr. John Lewis?
Well, actually it's a hybrid.
And there's an interesting story there, because it
really shouldn't have been in the end.
So we decided rather than designing from scratch
that we would start with a push chair
that was manufactured by a factory we had
a good relationship with.
But there's lots wrong with the design.
And we're like, okay, we'll redesign it.
But what we'll do is we'll keep the
frame, we'll keep the folding mechanism.
We'll upgrade it to premium.
We'll look at the textiles.
We'll bring in some new features.
We had these kind of wheels that took
out all the bumps and a suspension built
in which were quite clever and all this
kind of stuff.
So, but actually in the end, there were
two fundamental flaws with that logic, even though
it did save us tooling cost.
Actually, fitting around their existing chassis cost us
more time than it would have taken us
to design from scratch in the end.
And also we lost orders because people were
like, we love all the premium features, completely
see how a premium buyer will buy into
that, but your folding mechanism, some of your
moldings or whatever, they're just not premium enough.
They just feel like a mid-range push
chair because obviously it was.
And we hadn't anticipated that actually the buyers
particularly would be that discerning.
I'm not convinced that too many end customers
that would look at the quality of a
folding mechanism molding and go, that isn't good
enough.
I'm not spending 900 pounds on that product.
But certainly the buyers when they reviewed it
from distributors in other countries and whatever were
like, no, that's not high enough quality.
It's interesting, isn't it?
Because John Lewis is a quantity retailer.
They didn't have a problem with it at
all, but we did certainly lose other orders
because of that.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, and I guess it's one of those
things that you might not necessarily go in
fully armed without that knowledge if you approach
it for the first time and then you
might assume that.
Yeah, good enough is good enough in a
lot of cases.
The actual end user, so long as it
works away, they're not going to pull you
apart on the mold quality.
I would have thought so.
I think equally, there's a bit of a
lesson in that as well in that we
went in in premium, so our product was
900 pounds.
Bugaboo at the time, depending on what model,
it was 850 to 1,000.
Stocker was maybe 1,000.
There was some high-end kind of eye
-candy models that were retailing at more like
1,600 and stuff.
Mima was about 1,200.
We pitched it in amongst the premiums, but
I think we shouldn't have done.
I think we should have gone mid-range,
more volume, and not had that level of
discernment from the buyers.
If we'd gone to those buyers and said,
this is a 750-queer push chair, they'd
be like, okay, that's top of the mid
-range, but it's not premium, and they wouldn't
be there measuring us against those other brands
that had taken basically a bog-standard push
chair, if you like, and pre-minized it.
Whereas we didn't.
We took a kind of mid-range push
chair and then put a whole lot of
genuinely useful features and upgraded the textiles and
stuff.
Our bomb cost was about $200 on that
product.
The Bugaboo at the time, their bomb cost
was under $100.
Us was a significantly more expensive product to
produce, even when you take into account volumes,
and they're not that high in premium push
chairs.
There's not that much of a discount in
it.
But as a customer, you're getting significantly more
for your money with our product.
But being in that premium price point did
just open us up to a whole lot
of scrutiny that we could have avoided, could
have not chased margin and chased volume instead
to hit our numbers and gone from there.
But equally, there's loads in that market that
was just really tough at the time.
Yeah.
But there we go.
And you mentioned that you obviously were taking
it to trade shows.
You met potential buyers there.
Were you taking a prototype to trade shows,
or were you taking essentially the finished product
and you were pitching that to the buyers?
Yeah.
So because we were working from a mid
-range kind of existing push chair, we were
able then to actually get effectively factory samples,
albeit potentially with some prototype parts, that then
looked the part for those trade shows and
those consumer shows.
We raised $750,000 with investment in total.
So we went into tooling.
And because we weren't tooling the whole thing,
we could go into tooling quite quickly.
So relatively rapidly, we were actually sharing sample
product as opposed to prototypes.
And it's very, very hard to get a
prototype push chair to work like a final
product, look like a final product.
So we had to get there quite quickly,
really.
Yeah, we've dived deeper than I expected to
on the opening question.
But it's super, super interesting.
I'm guessing, so what you're saying is, is
the key lesson there, or I wouldn't say
regret, but key lesson, it isn't necessarily that
you worked from an existing product.
It's more about where you pitched it then
because you're limited by the premium-ness of
it based on the donor chassis.
Yeah, I think so.
I certainly didn't realize until I'd gone in
and done the project that actually if you
pitch it premium, and it seems obvious, right,
but I wasn't thinking about it, you're going
to get a whole load more scrutiny than
if you pitched it at kind of mid
-range.
And that did make a huge difference.
I think there's lots of other lessons in
it as well, but certainly kind of chasing
margin and going, we want to make the
maximum we can per product early on.
It's certainly not something I ever advise my
clients to do.
It's like you've got to get market penetration,
you've got to get volume, you've got to
get that factory relationship in a good place,
and you're only going to get that as
in when you've got some volume going through
there.
It's easy to get back to investors and
go, look, we've sold a lot, we haven't
made much margin on that, and we've got
mechanisms for improving that margin over time than
it is to go to investors and go,
look, we haven't hit our numbers, we haven't
sold much volume at all, but we've made
loads of money on each product and they're
like, well, and?
We weren't in it for a quick return,
Phil, what we wanted to see is volume.
And if you can prove the volume, then
arguably they put more money in if necessary
to kind of then find those kind of
ways of improving the margin.
Of course, you've got volume as well, and
you can then negotiate with your manufacturers and
you can squeeze the margin there anyway.
Yeah, I think that was a big lesson
really.
Amongst a whole lot of others, we wasted
a lot of money on branding.
I think we spent £126,000 with a
branding company, and it just bombed.
So we launched that brand and that messaging
that they came up with.
Cologne, a massive international trade show, 30 buyers
from all over the world in the room,
and they just came up to us after
they went, love the product, don't understand the
brand, don't understand the messaging.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And that was a big well-renowned company.
We'd taken references, all that kind of stuff.
And yeah, it was horrible.
The amount of equity I'd given up to
raise that money to do that branding, and
then it was, yeah, not good.
So what would you...
I guess you've been down this path a
few times, have you?
It's kind of launching products, but what were
the key lessons or kind of takeaways from
that kind of experience of the branding that
you could share with others?
Yeah, I think just because the company's expensive,
just because they say they're good, don't believe
it.
And I think the mechanism I use now
with our clients is say, look, use minimum
viable branding in the same way that you
do minimum viable products.
Don't go all out and spend an absolute
fortune to do everything and all your brand
guidelines and whatever early on before you started
selling something because inevitably your messaging and whatever
will change.
And what we thought was going to land
and resonate with our customers didn't in terms
of the brand.
And I think I'd also say, you'd be
very, very cautious of any branding agency that
sits there and goes, no, no, no, we
know what we're doing.
It's like, I want the data.
How many of our target customers have you
run this messaging past and how many have
said, yes, I'll buy a product that says
that?
Or how many have said, I prefer that
kind of logo to this one?
And the problem is, a lot of the
time, certainly with my experience, the guys doing
the branding, there's a lot of arrogance there.
As a product designer, I wouldn't ever tend
not to say to our clients, it's got
to be this, this is right, I know
I'm right.
It tends to be, we're going to do
the market research, are we going to prove
it?
If the client doesn't want to pay for
that, well, that's up to them at that
point.
Clearly.
But I would always do branding now with
the target market involved at every step of
the way to make sure that you don't
end up, yeah, £100,000 plus down the
line and it doesn't work.
Well, I guess, you know, when you think
about the professionally trained storytellers, aren't they?
So they're in the business of hopefully kind
of bringing you on a journey and getting
excited about it.
So if you're personally invested in the product
and the brand, it can be easy to
see why you might get, yeah, swept up
in that.
Yeah, they were, they were absolute masters at
that.
So every time we hit a kind of
a milestone where they were revealing something or
whatever, it wasn't just our PINGO, PDF and
email, it's like come in for a meeting
and then a lot of nice coffee and
they've got blah, blah, blah.
And then it's all on huge boards printed
around the room and, you know, all of
that just, you know, it's all curated to
make you think this is great and not
question it.
Whereas actually, you know, what would have been
much more helpful in retrospect was something that
was less showy and more focused on and
actually functionally working with the customer.
Yeah, I'm just getting visions of mad men
now.
Oh, awesome.
Well, let's dive into the actual first question
I used to ask was, Phil, why design?
What drew you down this path, you know,
all those years ago?
What kind of pulled you into ID?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
So I was passionate about two things really
when I was kind of choosing A levels
and all that kind of stuff.
I was passionate about building models, so ready
controlled aircraft, boats, all that kind of stuff.
Passionate about building little mechanisms and motors and
battery arrangements for ready controlled boats and all
that kind of stuff.
And yeah, kind of just loving that and
love DT in school and naturally, I guess,
found that an easier kind of subject.
And the other thing I was really passionate
about, which I kind of didn't tell anyone
because it just wasn't cool.
And I'm still not sure whether it is
cool or not, but I think it's cooler
than it was.
You're going to commit it to a podcast.
Yeah, I was just really passionate about nature
and wildlife, basically.
Okay.
And I looked at careers in both and
if I wanted a career in wildlife, then
basically I was going to get paid tap
and safety in a couple of buttons.
I was going to have to volunteer for
10 years on probably no pay.
And everyone else in the industry was 65
in a wax jacket and a male and
white.
And I was like, yeah, actually, I'm not
really, I'm not for that.
So I went into product development and product
design instead.
Yeah, and now it's minus the wax jacket.
It's, you know, middle Asian white blokes as
well.
Predominantly in the industry design.
Yeah, it is a deal.
I didn't manage to get any greater diversity
in terms of the type of contemporaries I
was working with.
But I did at least manage to get
decently paid from the outset.
That's awesome.
I'm looking at your qualifications, you know, it's
classic, kind of maths, physics and DTA level
and then industrial design and technology degree from
Loughborough.
It's like, you know, if we were the
other way around, I was interviewing for roles,
I'd be able to open my client book
for you because it's, you know, that's the
classic foundation what we look for, you know.
So, yeah, great kind of starting point.
To talk us through kind of those early
days then, you know, coming out of university,
did you know what you wanted to do?
Was there kind of a, obviously, it wasn't
nature at that point, it was going to
be design, so...
Yeah, yeah, I was very clear.
Yeah, very clear from from age of 14,
15, you know, having decided I was going
to do design rather than kind of conservation
or anything, I was like, right, okay, what
items do I need to do?
Exactly like you said, where's the best university
in the country?
And I went and made sure I got
a first from that university, basically, and then
made sure I got a job, did everything
I could to kind of do that.
And then, you know, I think even in
my yearbook at kind of sixth form, kind
of leaving, I was like, I'm going to
start my own kind of agency.
It's probably because I'm just really not very
employable, don't lie being told what to do
and tend to think that other people are
making the wrong decisions.
So, I was always aware that I probably
wasn't going to be able to work for
anyone else for too long.
At least, yeah, you were able to reflect
on that.
And I acknowledge, I think funny people go
through life wondering why they're not progressing because
they just don't work well under authority.
I think that softened quite a lot now
and I think having spent 15 years running
my own show, having exited the business kind
of at Christmas, I'm very excited about not
having to be the person in the room
all the time that everyone looks to, everyone
wants to start the meeting, who takes responsibility,
who's constantly worried about cash flow.
Well, you know, until a couple of years
ago when things really took off at D2M.
So, I'm quite looking forward now to that
and I'm certainly much more open to work
for someone else.
As an arrogant kind of, you know, 20
-year-old mid-20s or whatever, I thought
I knew better and, you know, I wanted
to be steering the ship, I guess.
Yeah, no, it's funny how things, how perspectives
change over years as well and just we
evolve as managers, as leaders, as employees as
well.
So, I've definitely become more zen as I
get grey hairs and, you know, I think
I interviewed Will Butler Adams from Brompton last
year and one of the things that, I'm
going to sound very AI now and I
say one of the things that stuck with
me but seriously, one of the things I
said is like, well, did anyone die?
You know, if you made a decision, did
anyone die, I'll get hurt.
If not, then, you know, that's fine.
Just learn from it and move on, you
know.
And so, yeah, whenever kind of, I've got
someone in my team that's, you know, worried
about making a mistake or they've maybe put
a typo on an email, it's like, no
one died, you know.
Next week no one's going to remember that
typo or, you know, whatever you've done, it's
fine.
So, I'm definitely getting more zen.
A few years back I might have lost
the spot because I was obsessed about detail.
Before we dive back in, this one is
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&D, this is not just another hire.
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me, Chris White, on LinkedIn, and let's talk
again.
Well, yeah.
So, we'll talk, so you kind of start
in D2AM.
Obviously, we'll talk about kind of where you
are at the moment, but in a moment.
You grew D2AM from nothing, essentially, at a
fairly young age as well.
You turned it into quite a serious operation
where you're developing products not only for clients
but also for the business.
What was the first decision, you remember, that
made it feel like a real business?
Was there a moment there?
Yeah, I think when we employed our first
member of the team, and it wasn't just
me in a back bedroom, and that was
only about three months after starting it, and
it was an incredible kind of growth rate
initially.
I'm not sure, in retrospect, I'd take much
credit for that.
I think there's lots of good tailwinds at
that point in the industry and whatever else.
So, I'm not arrogant about it, but it
did grow very fast.
It was 2010, wasn't it, when you started?
2010, I was 28 or something, and got
our first clients very quickly.
None of that really felt like a proper
business because I was still working in my
back bedroom or whatever else.
We then moved into shared offices.
It was really looking at CV and going,
yeah, that's the person we're going to interview,
and then going, okay, we're going to offer
them a job.
At that point, it was like, oh, actually,
this is working, this is bona fide.
I had some help starting the business as
well in the shared offices that we weren't
paying for and some kind of capital to
start it.
Not as much as I said we needed,
but nevertheless, it was still something.
At that point, it felt kind of real,
really, and someone else's mortgage was dependent upon
me being able to bring in enough work.
Yeah, it does make it real.
What triggered that first hire then?
Was it just demand from the clients or
were you?
Yeah, it wasn't even a designer kind of
hire.
It was basically kind of office manager.
Okay.
Yeah, so many inquiries coming in, so much
to kind of handle in terms of proposals
going out.
I was doing the design work and it
was like, it doesn't make sense for me
to be, well, I can't spend all week
dealing with proposals and new inquiries and then
all weekend doing five days worth of billable
work, that's not going to happen.
It was obviously cheaper and easier to hire
in an office manager than it was to
hire a designer first off.
Within two years, we were four designers and
a part-time kind of proposal writer and
stuff as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, it did grow very rapidly.
Yeah, I'm reading Buy Back Your Time at
the moment.
I don't know if you've come across that,
but literally the mantra is look at the
tasks that you perform on a daily, weekly
basis, which ones are high-value tasks that
you do exceptionally well and that only you
and the business can do exceptionally well and
then delegate as much as humanly possible, employ
people who are awesome at those not so
high-value tasks because otherwise, yeah, you just
find yourself being busy all the time.
Yeah, and that is the story of D2M,
that is the story of the 15 years
of building D2M.
We recruited a designer, probably a guy you
know, Rupert Worries relatively rapidly and I was
like, this guy is just so far above
what I could do design-wise.
That's the type of person I want to
employ.
I don't care that he's way better than
I am or I feel kind of inferior.
But he's working for my clients and helping
me build my business.
Well, great.
And I look at the guys now and
I tried to do some CAD this morning
because I'm still kind of finishing off a
kind of project.
So I was like, this is just a
waste of time.
I'm just light years behind my team.
So I just popped into the office and
briefed one of the guys on it and
he needs six hours later.
I've got something that would have taken me
probably the best part of three days and
it's much better.
And that's what I've done the whole way
through and I guess having delegated for 15
years, eventually got to a point where I
had a team that didn't really need me
and actually then realized that they'd be better
off without me, in fact.
And I was actually kind of holding them
back in some way.
But I only achieved that and only managed
to move out of the business and not
very many people do actually manage to found
the business, grow it and get to a
point where it can survive without them.
But that delegating and that employing people much
better than I am was the only reason
I managed to actually kind of do that
pretty.
Yeah, so it's awesome.
Like I say, especially in a small kind
of creative services business, creative problem solving business,
you often find the founder, I'm in the
same boat here, it's like we do things
really, really well and to our standards and
it's very difficult to let go.
But you can condition that muscle, can't you,
to delegate and once you do, that person's
awesome at that and...
There's been a lot of the way that
work also though, I have to say.
When we were kind of 18 people, it
was really hard to employ middle managers to
a point where we actually shrunk the company
and said we're just not going to try
again.
So we had, I think, three kind of
studio manager, design managers kind of in a
row and don't get me wrong, they weren't
all bad at all, but it didn't work
in the way that I thought it was
going to and some of that was probably
me and me needing to grow and get
more zen.
You're so afraid.
But equally, I think it's very, very hard.
I think that's one of the reasons that
I wouldn't start a design agency again is
because there just is not an abundance of
middle managers.
I've been to quite a lot of business
talks over the years, one recently, a guy
that runs kind of farm attractions so a
completely different sphere, but he's really successful and
doing very, very well, making lots of money.
But one of the reasons is that he
basically spends most of his time raising middle
managers, putting them in place and then taking
his hands off that bit and then raising
the next one.
It's all very well, but in an industry
where 90% of the businesses are five
people or under and therefore don't have any
managers, there's just no pool of physical product
design managers to draw on.
It just makes it very, very difficult because
basically you're having to train someone who has
kind of cultural impact on your business who
is unlikely to have experience in physical product
development.
I just found it very difficult and equally
we tried to kind of raise designers up
to become managers and designers, some of whom
didn't want to and we said, well, we
think you've got that ability and others who
wanted to, who didn't have that ability and
it has just never worked for me at
all really and that's been one of the
challenges and one of the reasons that we
didn't pursue a growth trajectory beyond.