Stokke

Building a sustainable business model innovation

Stokke Start is a circular business model to rent accessories for the iconic Tripp Trapp® baby chair.

Team Size

Timeline

UX Lead

Role

2020 - 2022

“How might we become a more sustainable company through innovation?”

Martin Riber Andersen
(former) Chief Innovation Officer at Stokke

Our newly formed innovation team was challenged by our Chief Innovation Officer and the management board to show ways how Stokke could become a more sustainable company, contribute to the fight against climate change and find strategies to become a part of the Circular Economy.

Where did this come from?

The Solution

“Stokke Start” is a subscription-based rental model that allows to offer a "buy + rent" combination for the iconic Tripp Trapp® chair and its accessories. In only 4 months we built a completely new sustainable business model from scratch.

Stokke Start

One of our main goals was to deliver a seamless experience that makes renting easy in an eCommerce environment thats familiar to our customer segments

As our solution combines buying a chair and renting the accessories we wanted to make the customization of the products as easy as possible

The platform is flexible enough to also offer rental-only products.

Stokke Start launched successfully in Spring 2022 and already generated it´ s first customers. Me and the team are more than proud of our work especially considering the available resources, organizational boundaries and the tight timeframe.

We minimised opportunity cost, de-risked the business model, overcame the limitations of our existing ERP and launched a pilot in only four months to learn and test results before deciding on a full-market launch.

Outcomes

Research and Analysis

The goal for every project we worked on was to quickly verify or falsify the hypotheses that we had created as a team to reduce risks as early as possible.

For the subscription business model the most pressing question we initially had was, if our customers would even consider renting or subscribing to our products as Stokke is positioned as a premium brand that comes with a premium price tag. We do hear a lot from consumers about sustainability and that it's an important point for them. But would they also walk the talk?

For that, we conducted focus group interview sessions with parents in major cities in Germany.

Is secondhand premium?

Interview guidelines

Focus group interview session

“The sustainable aspect is great and it also offers the possibility to test a product if my child really likes it.”

Martina from Munich

Research Synthesis

The outcome was quite a good surprise to us, as the feedback was very positive towards renting or subscribing to our premium products.

The majority of parents of our customer segments think positive of sustainable choices when shopping for baby products. We also learned about the aspect that parents can test drive a product and see if their child likes or uses the product. We hadn´t considered that as an important value proposition initially.

The parents also liked our early rough concept sketches that we tested with qualitative concept tests in the focus group sessions.