How do you define a visual brand language for your product line that resonates with your target users while communicating the uniqueness of your brand? How do you defend a polarizing design to your executives that you know is answering your users' needs?
John Cunningham, CEO of Ox Tools America, answers these questions and more as he shares his product development process that created their latest tape measure designed specifically for their target segment of contractors.
We continue our talk with John in Part 2 of this episode.
Intro track: Run Toward the Mountains - Ian Ethan Case
How do you define a visual brand language for your product line that resonates with your target users while communicating the uniqueness of your brand? How do you defend a polarizing design to your executives that you know is answering your users' needs?
John Cunningham, CEO of Ox Tools America, answers these questions and more as he shares his product development process that created their latest tape measure designed specifically for their target segment of contractors.
We continue our talk with John in Part 2 of this episode.
Intro track: Run Toward the Mountains - Ian Ethan Case
When it comes down to it. How do you define a visual brand language for your product line that resonates with your users while communicating the uniqueness of your brand? How do you defend a polarizing design that you know, is answering users needs? My name is Lynnaea Haggard, and today we are speaking with John Cunningham, CEO of Ox Tools USA. John, thanks for joining us today. I'd like to start today's discussion by just asking you a little bit about yourself and can you share some of the passions that drive you as a person and as a businessman?
John:You know, as, as odd as this sounds, you know, my passion is building businesses. I love starting new businesses. I love scaling businesses and I've had the fortune and ability to work for some major brands and some big companies and learned a lot. And now I try to take my learnings and help out other folks and let them get started and see how far we can get. You know, I spent 20 years of my career at DEWALT and Black and Decker, and been involved in many, many product development projects, rebranding, relaunches, and learned a lot about how to develop world-class products, how to really boil down the simplicity of user work and the simplicity of observation and listening. So taking a lot of those learnings, and now as CEO of Ox, really helping Ox, which is small business, to connect certain points: taking some of those disciplines that the bigger brands have and doing it on a conscious budget, but also following the principles of product development to make sure that they're delivering their brand promise.
Lynnaea:Now, John, you have a couple side hustles in addition to Ox tools, right? Could you tell us a little bit about nCamp and inPowered Lights?
John:nCamp is a camping company that myself and another industrial designer, Dan Cuffaro, who is actually a professor over at Cleveland Institute of Art,[founded together]. Certainly when you work with great industrial designers, it just makes a job that much easier, but also that much more fun to really have a brand promise and have a brand vision and deliver that through intelligent design. And then finally my wife and I started the company called inPowered Lights, which is a woman-owned business that really focuses on battery backup technology, but we do more decorative lamps. We have a lithium technology inside the lamp so that when power goes out, the lights come on. So it's an automatic switching from AC to DC and provides up to 24 hours of battery backup. Both lighting and camping are fun things to do, and one day, they'll be scaled and big enough that I'll hire whole management teams that run those companies and move on to something else.
Lynnaea:Ox Tools currently has a successful product line on the market. However, in the past year, they came to us here at Sundberg-Ferar for help in redesigning an updated and improved version of their tape measure, specifically designed with insights from their target users.
John:So really starting here, this is a project we worked on with the team and out in Detroit was actually where we did some of the user work. So it's certainly cold, and we learned a couple of unique things about the cold and hand tools that we probably didn't really appreciate before. So going through really the setup of the discussion, it kind of goes back to what I mentioned about having that brand vision and understanding what I always call[your purpose]. What is your purpose? Why do you exist? If somebody was saying, "what are we? What is Ox? What do we do?" We really boil it down to living the trade. We started looking at a lot of the trades and tradesmen out there. We started looking at what we'll call "the forgotten trades". So there's a lot of times you know the DEWALTs of the world will focus on the carpenter and the Milwaukee's of the world on the plumbing, electricians and HVAC. And we started looking at our user: the brick later, the landscaper, the hardscaper, drywall installation. Some of these are not the most glamorous professions, but we started looking at it like, "how do we become their champion?" How do we become their voice for what they want, to take the pain points that they have in their profession, and how do we make it easier? How do we make their jobs more productive? How do we make the ergonomics of the tools better so that if you're swinging a hammer eight hours a day - for you and I it's probably not a big deal just for the weekend, but if you're doing that five days a week, eight hours a day, it gets tiresome. What are those pain points? But really for Ox, it's about living the trade, being 100% focused and dedicated to the professional contractor. And like any good product development, it's also knowing who you're NOT. I think[with] COVID, this whole industry is going through massive growth, and there's certainly, a portion of the shareholders and management that would say,"boy, we should go after do-it-yourself", like,"we HAVE to go after do-it-yourself because that's where the market's growing. It's going crazy. Everybody's fixing up their houses. That's where we need to go." And, you know, we made a decision: No, it's not where we need to go. That's not our user. We don't need to cheapen the tools, we don't need to take away the focus on the professional to chase the short-term fad. So I think as everybody reflects on COVID, there's a lot of opportunities, but there's also a lot of chances to get derailed or g et distracted with shiny objects. So again, f or Ox: living the trade and focusing on those forgotten trades. So as we grow and we scale our business, we took a step back to say,"Hey, what is our visual brand language?" What is it that when somebody looks at a product, they say,"Yes, absolutely, 100%, that's an Ox product". What are those signatures? What are those very subtle features or elements that we could point to, t o say,"yes, that's uniquely Ox".
Lynnaea:Absolutely. And visual brand language, or VBL is something that we so often talk with clients about here at Sundberg-Ferar, because it is such an important part of strengthening your brand through the product development process. Can you talk a little bit about what visual brand language looks like for Ox Tools?
John:Obviously trying to trademark a color is the ultimate goal, but it's also very difficult. Only a few brands have been able to do it. So we do have a unique brand. We have a unique color. Our brand elements are being tough, dynamic, and different, and making sure that tough, dynamic, and different bleeds through the entire[product] range. But we knew that wasn't happening, so that's kind of what we're undertaking now is looking at: from this point on what is our VBL and how do we make sure that the VBL is not just looks, but it's truly functional. As you start looking at your competitive benchmarking, you start seeing common elements. One of the hypotheses that we came up with was boy, everything has gotten complicated! As we've talked about, sometimes it's easier to design a complicated product.The hardest thing to do is design a simple product. So how do you start looking at what is functional and what is, um, I'll call it distraction. What is this there for looks and what is there for function? As we started looking at our competitors, we saw a lot of opportunity for what we'll call simplifying the design. As we talk to contractors, as we get feedback from contractors, simple things like: the more moving parts the more chances for breakage, the more bumps, rubber bridges, the more chance for dirt to kind of infiltrate the product. So hearing those different elements, it kind of came back to saying,"how do we live our brand?" How do we make sure 1)we are tough, 2)we are dynamic, and then ultimately we're different. So when somebody looks at it on the shelf of Lowe's, they don't just say,"Hey, that a blue DEWALT tape. All the things look exactly like DEWALT, but it's a different color".
Lynnaea:You started with the hypothesis that a visual brand language for Ox tools needed to be more simplified. From there, how did you go about validating or invalidating that hypothesis and also fleshing out what that should look like in an actual tape measure through your design research, uncovering the pain points and needs and wants of your target users. And then, how did you allow that to affect the design decisions made for the tape measure?
John:In my philosophy, it starts with the user. It's going out there in the cold weather and talking to them. But I think more importantly, observing what people are doing. Most people can't tell you what the problems are. They typically can show you their problems, but they sometimes struggle with the articulation of what it is. So using a combination of factors,(sometimes surveys work, sometimes surveys don't), observation seems to be the best. So we spent four hours in the freezing cold and watched what the contractors did. And I think we walked away in four hours time with all the insights. But going through that day, we did competitive benchmarking, and found simple things that, again, until you're in the freezing cold, an aluminum tape or a chalk reel sounds like a great idea. Everybody wants aluminum. It's storable, it's rock solid, you know, Milwaukee is that way. But then you put it into the hands of the contractor in 10 degree weather, and he says,"man, I would never use an aluminum chalk reel". And it's like, why? It's the most durable. And he's like,"it's the coldness, you know when it goes in your hand, I'd rather have a piece of plastic and rubber overmolds so that it's not cold to touch"- just things that you wouldn't find out from a survey, you wouldn't find out from competitive benchmarking, you only find out by going out there and talking to the user. We actually filmed a lot of the testimonies to be able to go back and listen to it and be able to utilize it, and six weeks after we were there, we still have a good encapsulation of the other day. Now, you know, Stanley has been making tapes for 150 years, and yet there's still so many opportunities for improvement, for innovation. We really starting to dissect and digest, who is the user? What are they doing? You know, a plumber and a framer are two different people. They both might use tape measures but they both are probably gonna have completely different elements, yet the powers that be come back with one product that"fits all the needs". Our angle is really staying true to those users that we say is our brand and delivering a product that works 100% for them. And it might mean that the plumber doesn't like our tape measure and that's completely okay. So again, going back to that element of making sure you know, who the user is and deliver the product they want, not a product that you believe everybody will use, because nine times out of ten, no one's going to like it, and it's going to be in the middle of the road. There's a lot of challenges in user work and a lot of challenges in surveys and digesting them. And I think the point I would make is understand the different elements of the user demands and make sure that you don't cross all those demands, so that when you put it into the sausage maker and it comes back out, you have a tape that no one likes. Then you're going into the aspect of polarization. We kind of get into this stage of like, wow, okay, here's what the benchmark is today. Here's what everything looks like. If you took the brands off those top rows, and took the color away. You probably wouldn't be able to identify who is who. And that's kind of the goal that we had is we wanted to be able to take the brand off of it. We wanted to be able to still say, that's an Ox product. Absolutely, 100%, don't even need the color or the brand. So this was polarizing. And the question about selling leadership[on a design]- this was absolutely like,"no, John you're on the wrong track". And that's the one thing I would say about the process is that it's an iterative process. Again, you're not married to a design, you're married to a solution. And as long as you keep that, in mind, the form factor can go many different directions. And what you start with is not what you're going to finish, but you have to be married to the solution. We took all those[user] feedbacks, and a lot of those elements you see on the tapes, as polarizing as they are, it's a solution. And when you explain it to a customer, they, they get it. They understand why the end user says,"yup". You know, you still have to go through confirmation, but the visual aspect becomes the ability to be different, but the solution is going to be what makes it dynamic and tough. To be bold, to be different is scary. If we designed it like[every other tape measure] it would be easy. Everybody would look at it and say,"yup, that's what a tape measure should look like, John. Perfect, you're right on the right track". But[anything else] starts challenging the status quo. So that's kind of our challenge now is dissecting it and saying, okay, this is exactly what they want. We have the observations, we know how to solve it. Now it's getting into the phases of prototyping and confirmation.
Lynnaea:We continued this conversation with John by asking him some questions from our audience about their pain points in the product development process and questions like, when designing, should you put the customer or the end user first? How do you convince your leadership of the validity of a polarizing design? How do you transfer this product development process to the world of startups? John shares his thoughts on these questions and more in part two of this podcast, which can be found in the show notes or anywhere you get your podcasts. John, I want to thank you so much for sharing your product development journey with us here today and giving us a peek into the process of discovering and uncovering that ideal experience for your target users, and then incarnating that in a product. And I also want to say that we have been so thrilled, the team here at Sundberg-Ferar, to be involved with this and come alongside you in this process of ultimately strengthening your brand through facilitating this kind of in-depth design research and developing uniquely differentiated products. Once again, thanks for listening in. I'm Lynnaea Haggard, and this is Different By Design.