As one of the articles in Financial Times’ guide to a longer (and healthier) life, they have written about the complexity of getting old while feeling young. How do you find mobility aids that suits your spirit? According to FT our rollators, along with other products that UK based “Granny Gets a Grip” is offering, has the answer:
The Cause: Meet the rock ‘n’ rollators
Getting old while feeling young is complicated. I was born in the 1960s; as a teenager I listened to Bowie, longed to go to Biba and aspired to eat McDonald’s. My lifestyle was liberal; I took drugs and the pill. I bounced about to Jane Fonda workouts and was an early adopter of Pilates. I’d say at 58 I still dress on the right side of timeless: from JW Anderson to Re/done jeans and my crisp Casey-Casey shirts. And I still love Bowie and Pilates. But however youthful my exterior may appear, the memo has not reached my joints. I was diagnosed with degenerative discs in my back 15 years ago, I have to ask my husband to open jars for me because my arthritic hands can’t manage, and it’s no fun trying to get up from the sofa without making “that noise” as I creak to standing. My eyesight is also shot and this week, for the first time ever, I got sciatica, which is really bloody painful! Apart from that, everything is great.
This morning I did a spot of online shopping; I ordered a pair of adidas x Wales Bonner trainers, a Chanel mascara, and then I went to my new favourite website, Granny Gets a Grip. For those too young to know, its name is a nod to London’s hippest boutique of the 1960s, Granny Takes a Trip – a one-stop marketplace selling an ingenious edit of products designed for bodies that are showing signs of wear and tear. Founded by friends Sophie Dowling and Miranda Thomas, this website targets people who need a level of physical support but have a Conran Shop aesthetic.
Dowling and Thomas – both in their late 50s, like me, and who have enjoyed successful careers as a website designer, and physics teacher and magistrate respectively – have scoured the marketplace for products to make life both easier and more chic, from mobility scooters to elegant LED reading lights. The colourful edit is full of satisfyingly practical solutions: long-handled shoe horns, brightly coloured walking sticks, ergonomic garden tools designed to minimise bending, a perching stool with stainless-steel legs, and a sloped sustainable bamboo seat – adjust the height and you’ll never have to worry about standing-induced backache again.
?The byACRE red Carbon Ultralight rollator is so sleek I’d happily roll it into Celine while shopping.??
Where possible, Dowling and Thomas have had things made, such as their furniture raisers, which make it easier to get up from a chair or a sofa. “They usually look awful, like grey plant pots – hence they’re often known as ‘elephant feet’,” shudders Dowling. “We have had attractive square blocks made from bamboo and hardwood – and now they look terrific.”
“We also paid particular attention to hand rails, which usually come in nasty white plastic or metal,” says Thomas. “We had ours made in solid oak with brushed-steel brackets.” It’s a level of detail for a generation who grew up with good design. “My sister is 67; she hung out with The Rolling Stones when she was young,” says Dowling. “She and her friends respond to the bright designs and the chatty language of the site.”
What’s remarkable is that the site feels so pioneering. It offers the opposite of the products in those drab, geriatric catalogues that, once you hit a certain age, start arriving through the door. A recent paper by KPMG/Ipsos Retail Think Tank concluded that the “grey pound” represents the most considerable untapped opportunity in retail: it’s bigger than the “millennial pound” and, thanks to an ageing population, will only increase its market share.
I checked out with a haul including a memory foam knee pillow, which ticks a multitude of back-relieving boxes. Almost as exciting were the long-handle pet bowls – no more creaking first thing – and, lest we forget, the Dycem jar opener. With its non-slip cover, it’s only a tiny thing, and yet it is such a relief not to have to ask for help. Who would have thought mobility aids could be à la mode?
Source: Financial Times – The Cause: Meet the rock’n’ rollators – 5 October 2021
Three lessons from disrupting an industry
In connection with winning the FedEx Small Business Grand Prize, FedEx came to our office and interviewed our CEO Anders Berggreen. In this interview, he explains the beginning of byACRE and shares his top three lessons from disrupting an industry:
Three lessons from disrupting an industry
Going from producing film and TV series to designing innovative mobility aids might not seem like a logical career path, but that’s the course that Anders Berggreen, CEO of byACRE, has taken.
The Copenhagen-based business, which was recently named the grand prize winner of the FedEx Small Business Grant 2021, was co-founded by Berggreen and COO Susanne N?rmark in 2015. However, it wasn’t until later that they came up with the idea for the design-driven, carbon-fiber rollators (four-wheeled walking aids) that the company produces today.
The idea was the result of a chance meeting with the CEO of another rollator manufacturer at a product fair, where Berggreen was showing a different product. He soon found that he was seeing rollators everywhere he looked, but that they all looked the same.
“I thought about my father, who died of Parkinson’s. My grandma was 97 and she never felt old. [I thought] why can’t we make something cool for them? Let’s see if we can do something to reverse the perception of what a rollator is.”
He also spotted a business opportunity. The global mobility aid devices market was worth an estimated $7.8 billion in 2020 and is set to increase to $9.9 billion by 2021. But Berggreen argues that booming demand is also making existing businesses in the space lazy. “They’re growing like crazy, these stores. Turnover is going up and up,” he says.
Yet launching a new business with a product that disrupts the status quo comes with its share of challenges. A key hurdle is convincing people of the need to do things differently. Securing funding from the bank was a challenge and persuading retailers to stock the products wasn’t easy either. “They didn’t believe in us,” he explains. “We tried to go through retailers, but they were very resistant.”
Despite the difficulties, Berggreen and N?rmark have built byACRE into a thriving global business. Here are some of the lessons they’ve learned about what it takes to be a disruptor.
Once they started paying attention to the rollator market, Berggreen and N?rmark 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 N?rmark 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.
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.
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