Stokke
A sustainable business model innovation
Stokke, a globally successful Norwegian manufacturer of baby furniture and products broadly known for it´s iconic Tripp Trapp® chair, decided to create a frontend innovation team to tackle future facing strategic innovation projects outside of their traditional innovation portfolio. These innovations ranged from physical and digital products to new services and business models, as well as organizational innovations. I was part of this exciting innovation journey as an UX Lead (and in many more roles).
In the following I will give insights into one of those projects: Stokke Start, where in only 4 months we built a new and sustainable subscription-based business model from the ground up.
My Roles
User Research
Product Strategy
User Experience Design
Process & Service Design
Business Model Design
Project Management
Workshop Facilitation
Stakeholder Management
Company
Stokke
Year
2020 - 2022
Stokke Start
“How might we become a more sustainable company through innovation?”
Martin Riber Andersen
(former) Chief Innovation Officer at Stokke
We were 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.
We dug deep into research ranging from new bio materials, over innovative, decentralized manufacturing methods to new forms of business models to identify possible areas that could be a starting point for a company with the size and capabilities of Stokke.
As baby products are usually only used over a short period of time, our initial hypothesis was, that a rental or subscription model where the products can be refurbished or recycled after the usage period, could be a model that would have a big impact with a relative small footprint on our side in terms of changes to the companies ́organizational structure and resource need.
With a rental model we could innovate our business model and offer a "buy + rent" combination for the iconic Tripp Trapp® chair and its accessories.
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.
Research & Analysis
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, Munich
Research SynthesisThe 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.
Ideation & Concept
From idea to business model
Based on the user research and feedback we started to develop value propositions and business model sketches that would make the idea become more tangible to test our hypothesis: Can this not only be a sustainable but also viable business model?
Competitor Analysis
Value Proposition and Business Model CanvasWe analyzed competitors, iterated continuously on the elements of the business model and calculated dozens of variants of pricing structures to show that this subscription model can not only have a positive impact for the environment but also be viable business model in the future.
My colleague Felix calculating pricing strategies
Wireframe iterations
Me, discussing conceptsWhile drafting the business model we were synthesizing user research and combining it with business requirements to create iterations of user journeys, flows and wireframes to get an idea of how our MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) could work.
Rental or subscription models work quite differently from traditional sales models.
In our service blueprint processes like e.g. refurbishment, product return and product swap surfaced which are not typical for regular eCommerce and therefore require dedicated solutions.
That´s why we reached out to our eCommerce, IT, finance and logisitics teams early as we knew that the challenge to create new processes for payment, logistics, warehousing and refurbishment of the products are huge when implementing such a subscription-based business model.
Services & Operations
IT resources as bottleneck
Early version of a service blueprintInternal IT resources were not available and it would have taken months to develop the necessary infrastructure.
As internal development was off the table and time was ticking we decided to focus on our core competencies and looked for external IT partners. We brought a partner on board that could develop a lean standalone eCommerce platform that connected to their API-based SaaS solution to handle subscription-specific processes. This allowed us to bring to life the user journeys and deliver the service we had envisioned.
One of our main goals was to deliver a seamless experience that makes renting easy in an eCommerce environment that´s 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.
Results & Conclusions
In only 4 months from start to finish
Stokke Start launched successfully in Spring 2022 and already generated it´s first customers. In only 4 months we built a completely new sustainable business model from scratch and me and the team are more than proud of our work especially considering the available resources, organizational boundaries and the tight timeframe.
Are there any things I would do differently? Of course, dozens! Here are only 3:
The overall design and interactions. Due to time, budget and resource constraints we were not able to iterate more on those.
Implement the solution on the stokke.com website to increase visibility and awareness and offer better choice for customers
Improve logistics and refurbishment processes for better efficiency and more sustainability
Personally I learned a lot during this project and think it is an important first step on a long way to a more sustainable way of (circular) commerce for Stokke.