Neale 00:09
Welcome to another Bright Spark Podcast. I am Neale Mighall and with me today is Steve May Russell, the CEO, the head honcho, the brains behind Small Fry, the innovative product designers. How are you doing, Steve? Very well, thank you, yes. Thank you for joining us today. It’s all right. What an intro. And also, thanks for that news in the office. As you can see, we brought our sign. As I said before, this podcast is 90% this sign, so we tend to bring it with us.
Steve 00:39
We’re gonna get one after this. I bet you on commission
Neale 00:43
Yes, I am commission. I’ll I’ll give you the guys details later on. Okay. Okay, we’ll start from from the top. So the people who who don’t know you, you’re obviously a dynamic, young, handsome, go-getting guy. What brought you to the world of product design? Why? Why are you here? Tell us a bit about your background.
Steve 01:01
Yeah, I had no idea Industrial design, product design existed. I was doing a foundation course at the, what was, my Polytechnic, which was an introduction to all sorts of artsy things. And there was a guy who came along, saw what I was into, said, haven’t you ever thought about industrial design? Well, sat then. And so he explained a little bit about it. And I thought that’s exactly what I’m into. So I thought I was going to go into graphics, which, you know, the difference is huge between the leap between 2D and 3D, but it suited me down to the ground, or much more excited about technical things, mechanical things, how things work, taking things apart, repair my own vehicles and whatever. So yeah, it’s all those things combined into one.
Neale 01:50
You sound very much like some of our engineers, they talk about their toys, like to fix their own cars, that kind of mindset.
Steve 01:57
Absolutely. He attempted to build a hovercraft based on the Ladybird book of how and why a hovercraft works. At what age? Oh, I don’t know, probably 10, 12. He used to have a thing for building model aircraft and also understood the principles of how they fly from the Ladybird book of aircraft. So yeah, that was just my sort of thing really.
Neale 02:21
So there’s a few examples of clients and stuff I’d like to sort of dive into later on as you can probably see it’s a very clean office was surrounded by vacuum cleaners but that will become apparent why later. In industrial design, product design, you work in a lot of industries, a lot of different clients.
Steve 02:38
Yeah.
Neale 02:40
I know every project’s different, but what’s the sort of starting point? A client comes up to you, launches off, how do you approach a project?
Steve 02:50
Where are they and what do they want to do? What do they perceive their needs to be? And then we’ll go out and sort of, if possible, qualify that and make sure that, you know, when you walk into any business and you ask people what’s wrong with it, everybody will tell you. Of course, everyone’s got an opinion. Yeah, but it’s all a different opinion. And so we have to get that kind of alignment. So it’s important to really, you know, get an understanding of what they believe. And then for me, what really comes first is the people you seek to serve. So not everything we do is just about pure commerce and growth. So we work with, you know, NHS trusts and things like that. And it’s about getting the best value for what you do for money you spend rather than, you know, necessarily turning a profit as you do in the private sector. So it’s important to understand what the objectives are. And then we do really concentrate on what is actually going to make the audience happy. End user. End user, yeah. Not just end user, there’s end user, but there’s all the people in between. You know, if you don’t understand the intermediate stakeholders with them, what’s in it for me, then you’ve got a good chance. You’ll never get it to the end user. So there’s, for me, a big distinction between your customer and your consumer. Customer pays for stuff. Consumer’s the beneficiary of the service delivered.
Neale 04:13
And they’re going to reward the customer in the end by carrying on with the using the product in the yeah, I mean
Steve 04:20
It’s very important, I believe, to focus on customer satisfaction, because happy customers come back and happy customers tell other people. And in the world of the internet today, using it today, that’s where you’re outed really fast. So, you know, you can’t hide.
Neale 04:37
Yeah. Let’s just say, I know you work with existing clients and big organizations. If someone, because a lot of people watching this, a lot of people who we work with will have an idea, like an idea for a product, what would you recommend as a starting point? Is it sort of research into it? Is it sort of getting a prototype down? Is it understanding the audience at the market? What would be your starting point?
Steve 05:05
Well, I know I work closely with some IP lawyers and they hate me for this, but don’t immediately rush off and patent it, because we do find that people have some very good ideas and they’re founded on having identified an unmet need or a badly serviced need. But the way they’ve gone about solving that isn’t necessarily the best economical manufacturing, the practical solution. So they come to us as that’s happened on numerous occasions and we understand what it is they’re seeking to do, but then we’ve re-addressed that and found there’s a much better, more effective way to solve that problem. What they found that was most important was the problem to fix. So that’s a great place to start really. You’ve got options when it comes to innovation and you want to sort of, hunting for your opportunities to grow. You can obviously look at your existing products and your product portfolio and say, well, what do we need to do to iterate on this and what do we need to improve on this? But the world moves fast, technology moves on, and you could be in that situation where heaven forbid you’re polishing a turd. Fundamentally, it’s never going to get any better than it is now. And that’s not necessarily going to satisfy the needs of the audience that you seek to serve as well as new technologies. So yeah, the other alternative then perhaps is to look at technology, what’s happening in the world, the technology, what’s changed, what’s enabled you to do something you couldn’t do. Today, it’s possible. Yesterday, it wasn’t. Tomorrow, who knows? And so technology is one of those areas where it’s often you find it in that space where it’s a technology push, where it’s trying to find its feet in the world. And solve a problem and make sure that that is actually going to present a value proposition that works. Whereas the third dimension of that is probably market. What I mean by market is your customers, your audience. And that is really where we focus. I was privileged. I did obviously study industrial design engineering, but I also did an introduction to MBA at Warwick Business School and encouraged by my lecturer when I think Shell Live Wire Business Growth Challenge, national and regional final. On the back of all that, I managed to get a scholarship to study marketing under Philip Kotler. And so I was chatting away with him, enthusiastic young. And he’s written numerous books on the subject, but he said basically marketing comes down to one thing. If you give people what they want, they buy it. Yeah, drop the mic. That’s it, yeah. And it’s like that is so hard to establish. It’s so hard to find out. But if you focus on the market and what it is that people really want, that’s where you’ll find the new nuggets. Yeah. That’s where they’re very.
Neale 08:08
Yeah. You mentioned pogneted, great phrase. So you’ve got a product sort of come into maybe end of life. Are the designs that you think that can be completed? Is that that’s the end point or is it always like an evolution of a product? Has anything sort of like come to mind?
Steve 08:30
There’s different ways to solve a problem. And if you continue to assume that what you did yesterday is going to work for you today, you’re deluded. It’s not going to be. I can’t predict if I could. I’d be a wealthy man. I can’t predict what technology is going to enable us to do. But we’re just scrapping out telephone handset terminals and things like that. We used to work for Nortel and BT. And they’re going, by the wayside, it’s all digital now. You look at all the functions that you carry around in your pocket, in your mobile phone. What did that do to the camera manufacturing industry in terms of devastation? Because cameras are for taking photographs and videos and things. But not if they’re in a phone. They’ve taken a record of your shopping list or for reminding yourself of color schemes. Yeah, and all sorts of things. You snap a picture of it rather than write a note of it. Well, I do because I’m lazy. But within context, it’s got more information in that image than it has on a written note, which would take you ages to describe.
Neale 09:37
Google Lens can now scroll that text and turn it into text for you, put it into an email, send it a text message in a document. It’s so much simpler.
Steve 09:45
It’s a different world, you know. I’ve got a granddaughter who’s one, who’s one, and she’s wiping her finger across the screen of my phone trying to get the other images up. It’s like, I know you haven’t read the textbook. Yeah. The instruction manual, so.
Neale 09:59
my nephews are the same the sort of you take a photo straight away uncle neil can we edit that for you because they know we’re all the so what what so
Steve 10:06
world is going to be like when these people you know get into industry and yeah that’s the accepted practice yeah we go back five years and remember what you were doing back then yeah it’s amazing how much things have changed in that time it’s going to be a constant evolution then yeah so that’s that’s that’s really great for us because every day there’s another way
Neale 10:26
Yeah, I find this, I find this story fascinating. So I know part of it. I had the pleasure of catching the end of your EDS presentation, the Q and A section. So Hoover, we call a vacuum cleaner, a Hoover. It’s a brand, but it’s anonymous with the actual device. And it got, you can correct me, I’ll do a little intro, but you can correct me if I’m wrong. It got itself into a situation where it rested on brand laurels. The quality of the device suffered somewhat, and then along came Steve, small fry. Do you want to give us the? Yeah.
Steve 11:01
It’s no secret. I mean, they’ve co-presented that presentation with people from Hoover. They knew they’d got themselves into a pickle. Basically, it’s common. A lot of brands have done it. It’s easy to go over to Asia and buy a design, what they call white label, stick your badge on it and flog it. And with the best will in the world, you can’t actually get the best results for doing that, particularly when you’ve got competitors like Dyson and Shark on Shark Ninja at the moment are on fire in terms of being on point for solving problems people want fixed. Their ability to identify that. I mean, the research, we understand the research that needs to go into those things to get those ideas surfaced. And we do do similar stuff. That’s possibly why we were approached to help with Hoover. I found it before we used to be part of an internal design team that worked to be in queue. And when it came to lawnmowers, you know, people in Asia design and lawnmowers haven’t got access to grass like ours. Now, of course, if you ever look at the grass when you go abroad on holiday, when it’s hot, it’s like thick Brillo pad. It doesn’t have nice blades of grass like you’d see in the cricket pitch.
Neale 12:27
almost roots in between it’s like a it’s a mat isn’t it it’s thick and so
Steve 12:31
they haven’t got any empathy for the kind of challenges we faced and so similarly you know with with vacuum cleaner you know there’s a huge difference culturally across regional territories so for the Hoover we you know we were carrying out international research in Germany France Italy in the UK to find that common ground because you’re looking for mass customization opportunities core products the same but regional variation to accommodate taste and requirements and you know there’s there’s a very quirky thing you find in the UK is that we have a lot of carpeted rooms and particularly carpeted stairs yeah whereas mainland you know Europe doesn’t have that there’s a lot more hard floors and temperatures better so the types of
Neale 13:18
Pets as well, maybe, with lots of bread and more animals and… Well, pet hair is good. In carpet, in the carpet. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.
Steve 13:23
Naturally, you know, it’s a different device you need and to get that advice right. You need people who understand it And they’d missed it and they were just happy to buy Stuff where obviously there’s a cost there’s a you know, the non-recurring engineering development costs involved in these Items is not insignificant But the damage to your reputation and brand by being complacent and apathetic towards the needy audiences is worse And so, you know when your product is Retailed through certain channels. I won’t name them. It’s not a proud moment No, then that what they’re doing they’re obviously getting rid of stock that’s not sold and it’s not performed
Neale 14:04
Well, so they’re not going to restock it into high street shops in so there were people
Steve 14:08
John Lewis wouldn’t have entertained a Hoover round product at that time. When we started talking to them they were averaging I think around 3.6 stars which most people who go on to shopping channels if it’s not four stars or above you’re not even gonna take any notice of it.
Neale 14:27
My other half of the night, whenever on a holiday, you look at restaurant recommendations, anything below a full start, because you’ve got such a limited choice. Same with most products.
Steve 14:36
But we’re all the same, and we rely on those things. So the challenge is how do you get this brand back on track? And even more interesting, there’s a group of people out there between the age of 18 and 25, as you said, just think Hoover is a noun or a verb. And we talk to people when we’re doing research who are doing their hoovering with their Dyson and hoovering with their shark. It’s like, no, actually, you’re vacuuming. Vacuum cleaning. It’s not what we think that counts. We have to listen. That’s what we do. But it was interesting that there wasn’t a lot of bad feeling for the brand. It was theirs to lose. They didn’t have to win the position back. It was like an apathy, maybe.
Neale 15:20
Oh, that’s even too strong
Steve 15:23
There was an entrenched belief, self-belief in the ability to determine what exactly their customers wanted. But when it comes to understanding what your customers need, when you have an argument between your customer and yourself or your senior management team, there’s only one of you that’s going to win every time. So we listen to them, the customer. And we’ll go in, I’ll happily go into a C-suite and say, you’re not your customer, you have to find out what they want, not what you think they want. And that’s fundamental to getting this thing working. But there’s a whole host of other things we had to change in terms of the culture of the organization to get them more receptive to the idea of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and then actually energize and engage and revitalize that enthusiasm for the brand, bring that energy back, which we did. People started to believe they could actually turn this around and pull it out the back, which is just as much as a design job, that was the job we had to do across continents. We’ve got an international marketing team in Italy, Milan Experience Design Center based there, people over here and product marketing teams and the channels. We brought them into sessions where we showed them the tear dance on the competitive products and explained the technologies and the pros and cons of those things. And suddenly they knew a lot more about what they were selling and getting enthused.
Neale 16:48
a great extra value to add for organization. Yeah, yeah.
Steve 16:51
to do though really when you do such a cultural
Neale 16:53
Absolutely. It reminds me when you’re saying about going to CXX and just chatting and saying look what you think, what the audience thinks, what you’re different. There was an illustration of parents around a car and they’ve got a beautiful mobile and it’s like oh look at the elephant and look at the gorilla isn’t it pretty and you’ve got the baby’s point of view all you can see is the undercarriage of animals you know so it’s what you think they want compared to what actually the user needs it can be very very different.
Steve 17:22
Yeah, and this is something you’ll hear me say a lot, is that we don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. And that’s, you know, back to your background, how you were brought up, your education, your cultural exposure to what, you know, and that is the framework within which you make judgments. However, that’s not the same for everybody. Everybody’s got their own values. One of the big things that I do encounter is an inability for people to demonstrate genuine empathy. Okay. A difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is, you think, aligned. Empathy means you don’t have to agree with what you say, what people are saying, but you have to understand what they’re saying and why they’re saying it. And that, if you can’t get to that point, then we’ve got a big problem, because you’ll never be able to understand how to, you know, empathize and support that view. Understand that point of view, yeah.
Neale 18:19
Yeah, it’s really interesting point not quite a frivolous question, but one that I thought be quite interesting If is there an existing product? Maybe it’s not you use day to day or a device or a bit of kit that you Think you could just make that little bit better Is this something you’re dying to grab your hands on and go? Oh, we could just tweak this make this and then conversely to back that up as another question Is there a product that you say, you know what? I wish small fry were all over that that is perfect
Steve 18:53
No. No. The reason being that would be put in my personal opinion ahead of the audience that device is developed to deliver to and so that’s guilty as charged of everything those people in those senior management teams do. It’s like oh actually just make this better. Okay. Really on what basis what research and insight have you got to say your opinion here you might have found something that’s a fundamental flaw or fault so perhaps then go for it. Yeah. But you’d have to I would personally want to qualify that that is amongst the highest priorities of things that that audience wants to fix. Yeah. So the way we work is we would find out what we call a 10-point plan the main areas that that product must deliver on from the perspective audience opinion and then try to understand the priority of those issues what is most fundamentally important you know and this sounds stupid because and it did actually get quite heated. We do create personas and platforms and their areas upon which you seek to understand the drivers and desires and drivers and so on of the audience but above all else a vacuum cleaner’s got to clean and that had been lost in the translation. There were all sorts of clever promotions and gadgets and widgets and things you could stick on to the side of the but if it’s cleaning performance isn’t good you’re screwed and you know other things we discovered like you know I don’t want to give too much away but one thing they talked about the audience when we spoke to them is no pit stops you know and no pit stops meant I don’t want to have to stop and change to move the plug empty the bags change a tool find something else all those exactly that just interrupts you want this job done so you can go back to life you know because you don’t love vacuum cleaning no but people do get satisfied by vacuum cleaning if they achieve a result if they get the stripes in the carpet but you know if you the problem we’ve got is you do need really good well qualified and trained researchers on the case here and the hours are really good because they come from a background and design and they’ve transitioned into research so make some sets them apart from researchers who are market researchers who understand marketing stuff they understand the practicalities yeah and they also understand that you know 40 percent of communication is verbal 60 not so the observational techniques are really important you have to see what they’re saying and like me I’m using my hands I’m conscious of it now using body language yeah it’s body language and you know things like we did discover that they talk about power but The engineers hear power and they think, oh, bigger motor, bigger motor, more weight, more cost, heavier, sucks it to the carpet. That’ll do. Well, you can’t move it then. You can make it, you can probably make it suck itself to the ceiling and stick there if you want to. But it’s not what they meant. When we probe, you have to understand that’s an area we need to qualify that. So it turned out that actually what they wanted was Superman, not the Hulk. Not a big fat, brutal thing, but it was something lean and nimble and sleek.
Steve 22:12
And they felt, when we delivered, that they’d got supercharged Superman. But another example is that, why does some vacuum cleaners have lights on them? And what does that mean? Where people go, so they can see the dust under furniture. It’s not actually, it’s also a sign of how effective it is. They judge how effectively it’s cleaning by how bright the lights are. If the lights dim, they start to think it’s underperforming. Power away from, yeah, suction. And so it’s a lot more, it also means no pit stops. Because if there’s a room where you haven’t got a light on, you haven’t got a stop to turn a light on, it means they can carry on. It’s stuff like that, you’ve got to get inside their head. And you’ve got to work really hard to actually, if you accept face value, when you ask, this, I love this, we talk to companies, do you do market research? Yeah, we do market research. Oh, how do you do that? Well, we ask them some questions and see what they say. Genius, best of luck with that one. And even better still is an unaccompanied questionnaire. Yeah, over email. Oh, yeah, do it online, you get a thousand answers back. It works, but not in this kind of situation. There are times we use it, we do use it, we put out visual brand language questionnaires and colour schemes and get a general consensus of opinion from an age group and stuff. But when it really matters, these are sort of key questions, key areas you need to know about. You’ve got to dig a little bit deeper than that. I mean, at this, what we’re talking about is, was reformulating the DNA of this baby. And if you want it born without defects, you put the effort and energy into formulating that DNA to get it right. And it’s the same across all of the stuff we do to a greater or lesser extent. Not everyone’s got the budget that had to be applied to this to get where they wanted to be. But the processes. The processes, and we apply it to service as well. We walk in our customers’ shoes and we have a day in the life of and we get to experience ourselves. And there are some fundamental principles which are overlooked in service provision and delivery. It’s so simple to find some of these things. You think, well, why don’t they do it? I don’t know what it is. There’s quite a few clients that kind of have an aversion. They’re almost scared to ask customers what they want. Because it might mean enough to change.
Neale 24:28
change something and then they have there’s more work involved more budget and there’s comfort in putting your head in the sand I suppose it’s definitely sure budget
Steve 24:36
this is the thing. I can guarantee people that spend money with us don’t do it. It’s not sunk money. No, no. When you’ve now turned a product into a 4.7… It’s definitely value. John Lewis of interest. They take it. That has a commercial benefit. I mean, the returns on the work we do, literally, I looked at it, it goes into billions. Flashing train issues half a billion straight away. It’s not a cost, it’s an investment, but people are scared. They’re risk averse. I think if you’ve worked with people that don’t have a robust process and methodology, I can understand that. If you’re talking to designers that are articulating their proposition around aesthetics and taste and stuff, I’ve not really got a place in my understanding of the role of industrial design, which has got a clue in the title. We work with industry and our focus is business growth, how to get organic growth rather than acquisition from a strategically planned map of NPD. You got me wound up.
Neale 25:51
Now, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fantastic. You just know all the acronyms as well. Okay, so I fully appreciate that for what you said in terms of you wouldn’t take a product and say I can make it better based on without the research and that’s great. But the other half of that question, it was, is there a product that exists that you think, I wouldn’t say flawless, but just one that’s close to your heart, they think that’s really clever.
Steve 26:21
Um, with the thing about really clever that it’s momentary. So at that time when it’s launched, you think that’s, that’s good. Yeah, that’s nailed it. But what happens that becomes set as the benchmark norm, and then the job becomes to beat it. So in this world that we operate in, I think the best analogy is formula one. You know, how much of the car from the previous seasons carried over, it’s not through regulation changes and all sorts of other things. You know, they’re constantly bringing those upgrade packs, um, to the thing. So business is basically a race. You can’t win. The best you can do is hope to lead it for some time. And so for every product that comes out, that’s stunningly good, you know, everybody they’ll do what we would do, which is if I was asked to improve a product, you do SWOT analysis on it to compare it to the competitor set. You see what else is around that solving the same problem. And then you work out how to better it. So yeah, there are times when things have been launched and you think, wow, that’s amazing. Uh, and our first job is, well, that’s amazing. How can we beat that? What are we going to do to get around that? How are we going to improve upon that? So yeah, love it. But there isn’t any, uh, anything that stands out to me at the moment. Um, uh, I am loving quite a lot of the AI tools and things, but not from a point of view of generating design and CAD, but just the way that they access information and organize that information, index it and, you know, in particular, um, it’s where that’s going to go. I don’t know, but it’s, it is staggering.
Neale 28:02
I was going to say, I mean, I was thinking of 3D printers, they came in, obviously in terms of industrial and product design, that was a game changer. AI is very much on a lot of people’s minds in terms of digital photography, content creation. Do you think it’s got a place in design in general?
Steve 28:27
I think I’d be a fool to assume it hasn’t it’s got to have. There are certain interventions which at the moment need human eye casting over them. I’ve played with a few of the image generators fed in you know objects and that’s it to create derivative versions. Some they don’t work because they don’t understand the mechanics behind the objects but the stimulation to the thought process is really handy. You know we do things which are like mood boards and style boards and theme boards which would normally scour the internet for examples and reference images that we use in steering our thinking but you can use AI in the same sort of way and that’s that’s really quite interesting at the moment but it’s not it won’t do at this minute you won’t go the whole hog. But yeah you ask it to design some concept cars in the style of amazing what it comes out with. Never work but not practical. As a thought experiment. Well and then it starts you thinking it’s like having a sketch buddy next to you that will help you think more diversely. It does that diversification thinking for you or can do.
Neale 29:42
Okay, yeah, as you know, this is this is gonna go on on YouTube and we put a lot of clips on LinkedIn So I’m thinking with my LinkedIn brain If you could in a nutshell Some eyes because you’re about you said you’re about the end user What does the end user want from from from a product?
Steve 30:08
I think ultimately the best you can do is to get a product that’s pleasurable and meaningful. Because if you’ve got something that’s a joy to use, you enjoy it and that has a significance in your life, it takes away a chore, it makes something easy or whatever, then that’s when you’ve got a really good proposition. It’s not enough to just function and perform because there are so many clunky interfaces on things and they make you work hard to get the result you want, but some things are just a joy. And I think the kind of smartphones over the years they’ve evolved, they’ve become kind of something which you have to have on you almost, well for certain people anyway, I am one of them. So much revolve. And there’s a genuine condition I believe called nomophobia, which is a fear of loss of phone or…
Neale 31:09
You can’t find it nearby. You get a little bit of a panic, good rules.
Steve 31:13
experience regularly with my wife, I think every time we go out. Because all the, I mean, it’s face recognition, so you don’t remember passwords, you get access to all sorts of things, banking, paying for things. Like I said, photography is sort of, there’s all that functionality. So the way you get into that and use it, it’s no longer at that much of a chore, and that for me is probably, you’re looking for that positive contribution to making life a little bit better for you. That’s where I’d say it needs to be.
Neale 31:53
Fantastic. Steve, that is everything I wanted to cover off with you. Thank you for joining us. It’s all right, no problem. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much.