Stokke
Building a sustainable business model innovation
Stokke Start is a circular business model to rent accessories for the iconic Tripp Trapp® baby chair.
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.
“How might we become a more sustainable company through innovation?”
Martin Riber Andersen
(former) Chief Innovation Officer at Stokke
My Role
As a UX Lead, I was part of a newly formed frontend innovation team. Our mission was to explore product and business model innovations that would come to life in a 5 to 10 year horizon.
Research & Analysis
Is secondhand premium?
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.
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 idea of a 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.
Interview guidelines
Focus group interview session
Research synthesis
Petra from Munich
Focus group participant
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.
Ideation & Design
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?
Value Proposition and Business Model Canvas
Competitor analysis
Research synthesis
We 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 models
Wireframe iterations of the eCommerce website
Solution & Outcomes
May we introduce: Stokke Start
“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.
Together with external partners we created an eCommerce Shopify solution that allowed customers to configure their products and accessories.
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.
Mobile first
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 the results before deciding on a full-market launch.