BRANDS
Chris Small, woom VP
bikes’. What makes woom the successful business it so clearly is? I’d say that woom’s success is, quite rightly, attributed to its innovative, ergonomic design, deep customer understanding, and emotional storytelling. Our ideas and our actions are what lead to a projected €150 million in revenue this year. What does it take to get here? Well, it’s certainly interesting to say that neither Chris nor I come from the cycling industry. Our expertise comes from other business environments. I was previously CCO at Hugo Boss, and have experience at Red Bull as well as time working in private equity. Chris comes to woom with extensive product design and industrial design experience across a variety of business sectors, including sports goods, working with seed-funded start-ups and large multinationals.
I should mention here that we definitely do have a host of people within the business who have deep cycle-specific experience. Our woom team has such a rich and diverse blend of experience that we make the absolute best of. Hopefully, it’s also easy to see that we, as a brand, have a
very different approach to engaging our target audiences - parents and young riders.
Chris, can you expand upon this a little for us? How is the woom approach different to that of other bike businesses? Sure. Two key phrases I’ll introduce here: Firstly, woom’s success stems from emotional storytelling, aiming to connect with customers’ hearts and minds. Matching this, we, across the business, intimately understand and work with a user- centric design approach. In more everyday language, deeply understanding the needs of both parents and children is critical - parents are primarily in the driving seat for purchasing decisions.
In my experience, that’s easy to say but hard to do. What I mean to say - when you can explain it clearly, in a
www.bikebiz.com
single sentence - my experience is that organisations that can do this have put a lot of time and effort into making it seem and sound that simple. It’s hard work to distil business-critical culture and concepts into such a short and to-the-point message. Thank you. I’d agree with you. Woom’s approach is anything but simple, requiring significant investment in user-centric design and storytelling, which many companies avoid due to the perceived effort. Why do we do it? I’d highlight the non-transactional goal
of developing products and experiences that build trust with parents and empower children. It’s very easy to design something complex, but extremely
difficult to design something simple. There aren’t many companies out there that invest so much in user-centric, human-centric design, experience, storytelling and everything else needed to support this - I think, because many in our industry see themselves as a product business, first and foremost. Our belief, as a company, is that this investment, this approach, this focus is, ultimately, what makes the difference.
That the business understands this, can articulate this, across functions, means everyone works toward a clear vision. Bernd, can you expand further on this? The phrase is emotional storytelling. At a design level, this internal narrative is there right at the start of the process - something Chris often points out. Innovations need to be clearly articulated. We have two users to consider as
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