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Powertraveller

SGB: At ispo, you showed us the prototype for the startmonkey…

JR: That’s going to be launched this May. It’s working really well – I actually had to use it on a boat recently that had been in storage all winter and it worked like a dream.

Powerchimp

can use our products in your everyday life too. Just like a The North Face jacket, which might be brilliant in the Arctic can also be used to go down the shops for a newspaper and a pint of milk. It doesn’t have to be used exclusively in the outdoor, but it is exclusively designed for the outdoor.

SGB:

JR: We’re in our second five-year business plan now. We’ve developed the range, and now we’ve gone into the sales and marketing aspect of the business, to actually say we’re now ready to go into the outdoor sector. These products have been tried and tested by the military, and we do a lot of testing with the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation. They have game rangers in Africa, who we supply with all their communication technology products and they provide us with real time feedback on how the products are working for them, because they’re living with it out in the field. It’s had a big impact on how the products have been developed.

SGB: Who are your customers?

JR: They are very, very varied. For example, we recently had a guy come in who is doing a trek to the magnetic North Pole for Help for Heroes. He walked in with his Iridium Satphone, his camcorder and mobile, and he left with a solargorilla and a minigorilla; we got all his gear working with it, and he will now be able to keep in contact with everyone, and record everything too.

Also, we heard from a lady who had never been on holiday but wants to go on safari; she has a medical implant which puts medication into her spine. She needed a battery pack to be able to do it, and we were able to make this possible. Things like that help you realise how important power can be.

At ispo, the feedback we got from the product was extraordinary. That show was excellent for us, and we’ve been taken on by a huge number of shops and chains in Europe as a direct result. Some of the big players in the UK have also signed up – we’re waiting for the first orders from Ellis Brigham and Blacks right now.

Silverbackgorilla

SGB: That’s great from one show…

JR: We had a good response in Friedrichshafen [at OutDoor] last summer, but ispo was huge for us. We’re going back to Friedrichshafen this summer too, and awareness of Powertraveller will be much greater, so it should be a good show for us. There are companies that go to China, get a product and put a name or label on to it, then try to market it and sell it. But what everybody saw from us at ispo was, this is a British company that has invested in developing a complete range, specifically designed for their industry; they’re not selling anything else, they’re just all about power. We’re working with three major names in the outdoor industry now, to integrate our products with theirs. They’re household names, and that’s incredibly exciting for us.

Solargorilla

SGB: When is the silverback hitting the market?

JR: We were hoping it would be out by now, actually, but because it’s our most technologically advanced and most challenging we’ve ever made, it’s been going in and out of the approval laboratory for the last few months. It’s going to be a world first, a truly portable UPS [uninterruptable power supply) system, they’ve been working with us and helping with some of the challenges of heat, cooling and performance characteristics, so we’ve been changing the PCB [circuit board] on it. We’ve been going through a few iterations, and we’ve had some on test, but before we can go in to mass production we have to get final approval. I hope we’ll have product ready for June, though.

Powermonkey Classic

SGB: What’s the RRP range of the products?

JR: The powermonkey-eXplorer, our best seller thanks to its ability to be recharged via mains, USB or solar panel, retails at £65. The powerchimp has a retail price of about £20; the powergorilla is about £150. The silverback we’re still not sure what that will retail at. We have product all the way between the chimp and gorilla, of course.

SGB: What are you doing for retailers in terms of POS, as your product range is basically unique?

JR: The issue for us is how do we get across our message to the consumer – they don’t want to know how something works necessarily, they just want to know that it does work. So what we have done is come up with a range of floor display units, some of which were at ispo, and we’ve come up with lots of new literature to give away to consumers so they can work out what they need from the range. We’re also updating the web site, so it’s multi- language and we’re adding a product selector to it, so people can easily find what they need for the job. The biggest thing we’ve had to do is in-store training; we recruited three people who have been around various stores to train staff,

and give out samples so staff can understand the products. It was expensive to do, but people now know that power is a category in its own right and should be displayed as such in the store. So a customer buys says a GPS product, and the staff member can then say, “How are you going to power this off-grid? We have options for that just over here…”

Solarmonkey

MAY 2010 SGB OUTDOOR

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