Sugru is a tiny
product and you've
all got one on your chairs
if you're not sitting on it and flattening
it and warming it up.
It's a tiny product
that started with
a pretty huge observation
I was studying design at
the Royal College of Art and
I thought, 'Do we really need
all this new stuff? What
about the stuff that we already have?'
For 50,000 years
we used our hands and we made
things and if they broke
we fixed them and like the
photos that Tom showed
if they didn't work the way we
wanted, we adapted
them to work the way we want
them to work.
So that's where Sugru comes from
It is
a new type of material
and it's really
there to-, I wouldn't
say make people creative, because
I believe that we all are
actually inherently
really good creative problem
solvers and Sugru
exists to unlock
that in anyone where it's
dormant. So we'll come back to that challenge 36 00:01:26,370 --> 00:01:26,070 later.
The way it works is that
it's very much like Play Doh, like
you played with when you were a kid, when
you take it out of the pack. It
feels really nice and
mouldable, you can mould it into any
shape.
It bonds to almost any
other material
and overnight then, just leaving
it in the air, it will turn into a really
nice durable, flexible
silicone rubber. So basically
you can fix, modify
improve, hack almost
anything.
Five years ago we sold our first
pack. Today we've got a million
Sugru users around the world
That's a huge number for me, so I'm
very excited about that. It's not a
Google number, but it's a
massive Sugru number. They're
in 163
countries around the world.
We started on sugru.com
and now today we're actually
in 5,000 stores
predominantly UK and US
and the Nordic countries
and by the end of the year we'll be
in 10,000. So this
is getting out there.
My dream for it is that someday
it will be in kitchen drawers
everywhere, just in case
When we launched we were two people
So to make this thing big
the way we wanted, we needed
an engine and that engine
for us, was people.
We decided to build a community
So
this is about launching
to learn, like we're going to talk about
but it's also about launching
to motivate people to then
be able to help us grow
as well.
When we launched, Sugru
wasn't perfect.
It was nowhere near perfect, it's
still no perfect today, but
that's okay. We had to be okay
with that. Not only was it kind
of okay, this is our website
when we launched and our packaging
It was pretty rough around the edges
, but
not only would that be okay
for our customers, we actually felt
that if that was kind of rough
round the edges, and everything wasn't decided
that the nature of our kind of
customers, who are
makers and doers, that would actually
get them excited, because
they would be able to help us
make Sugru become the product
that they wanted it to be. So we
never said exactly what
Sugru was for. We basically
put our trial users at the
front of all of our marketing
and we said what they did. So
for example, 'Ed made a phone
holder in his old car that
didn't have one. What will you do?'
So it was this challenge and
the reaction has been incredible
We've got this unbelievable
engine that keeps spilling out
new uses and more and more
uses
which obviously helps us
grow,
helps our users to inspire their
friends to try to fix things, but
it also helps us to learn. So
we learned what people did with
Sugru. They did practical things
like cables seem to
always break at that point
plastic seems to always
break and there's no easy way to fix
it.
Where there's water, there are leaks
people want to fix that.
They do ingenious things
so, for example, adding magnets
to this drill so this person has
their drill bits where they want them.
Banging doors, turn them into bouncy
doors.
One of our users discovered that
Lego men are the perfect
holders for your iPhone cable
beside your bed
and
they do inspiring things. This
is from one of our users, Belinda
whose husband is blind
and when she's out
at work, he can't use the microwave
She's turned her microwave into
a Braille microwave with
a little tiny piece of Sugru
This is Joanne. She's a canoeist
and she wanted to do
this huge marathon race
but she only had fingers
on one hand and to do this race
which was 700km, she would need
to be able to paddle on both sides
She got her friend to
basically put a screw into the paddle
put a little bit of Sugru round it, she
sent us this picture after she'd completed
the race in three days and three
nights with no sleeping. She was
like, 'This is the best thing I've ever done in my life
I couldn't have done it without Sugru.' Sugru's
this tiny little humble
little-, I'm not going to say it's a piece of shit. It's
not a piece of shit. It's awesome but
she is awesome and it
has helped her to be a little
bit more awesome. So lessons
that we learned by launching
when Sugru wasn't perfect
people are bloody amazing
and they will
do amazing things and they
will help you if you
are genuinely trying to do something
great, they will help you and
that is so motivating, for
our team, for me, for everyone
We have this amazing visibility
to our customers and connection
They told us what it's for
80% of uses of Sugru
are in the home.
We can watch and see
exactly what are the repeated
things that people are doing so that
we can then feed that into our marketing
Who are they? Who likes it? Well
it could have been anyone,
but we really learned about
them. One of the biggest things being
that it's not about age. We have ten-year-olds
twelve-year-olds who are crazy about Sugru. We've got
90-year-olds who are crazy about Sugru. This is
about mindset and the biggest
characteristic that brings them all
together is a sense of independence
Independence like 'I don't have to call my dad'
Independence like 'I don't have to call a plumber'
'I want to live life my way'
That's a massive thing that fed
into our brand development
What could be better? Well, you saw
our packaging was bloody-, well
I thought it was awesome when I launched
but we've made it much better now
So packaging is one big thing
they've helped us to develop.
Sizes. We used to have lots
of sizes. We've only got one size
now, because they kept asking, 'Can I have it in smaller
pieces?'
and colours. We've expanded the
colour range to ten colours, so that
they can match and blend
and then where are they?
It's just amazing when you see
who starts selling on ecommerce and then
you think it's going to be in one place
and they're actually everywhere. 50%
of our customers are in the US
and that taught us as well where to put
our time and our energy
in terms of our retail
expansion. We're expanding
now, we've just launched in Target
nationwide across the US
Whoop, massive big deal
and so we learned that because that's
where our customers were.
This is our team, so we're not two people
any more, we're about 50 people
and we're expanding
and growing fast, thanks
to our customers.
So yes, when you're coming up with
your next product or even, like
little initiatives, I would
really encourage you just
like, get it out there as fast as you
can. There's no better way
to learn, exactly like Tom
said with the path going through the park
there's no better way. Your customers
will tell you what they love
and hate. You've got that piece of Sugru
on your seat. I dare
you to take the challenge. If
you haven't used your creativity in
a while,
just wander around your house
have a little look on our website
and find a problem and
solve it.
Thank you.