Develop & Design

[Ross Milne]

I'm a firm believer in the fail fast model. Literature research or reviews only take you so far, then there's another part which is jump in and do it. Working with the product, working with the process, you learn quickly, you know, breaking the process is- is really useful. You get to understand where- where those limits are, and you learn quickly from that.

[Sam Burton]

So, when it comes to product development, um it's- it's very seasonal. We're designing one season at a time, and typically we're designing about 18 months to 24 months into the future. What we try and do is break it up into a couple of different levels, so there's product that we can implement right now, that's ready for the market, and that might be something we can swap colors in and out of. Then there'll be other, I guess, supplementary R&D projects that we're working on such as a new sole development, or a new material that will be slightly further reaching.

We had just developed this sneaker, um and we'd been working on it for about 12 months, and we started to get a lot of really really high pressure come on from the sales team to get that to market, to make it available for the- for the coming season. Once it got out to market, we realised that um there was some delamination happening off the toe cap, because while developing this sneaker, simultaneously we had been developing a new abrasion resistant toe cap. And it all started delaminating on all of these- all of these shoes once they got out to market. We're talking 20,000 pairs, so before it actually reached our end-customers, we made the decision to withdraw the product from market, which cost us about a million bucks. It's a million-dollar decision, but because the brand had been around at that point for 27 years, our brand was worth more than that, so we just had to make that call. What we did is we went back and talked to the team in Indonesia, but also looked really hard at our own development processes, and that's what led to this kind of more fragmented development approach. So, instead of developing one product from scratch every time with a whole lot of risk associated, and break that up into little components, and say 'well let's work on the toe caps over here, and the sole over here, and when they're ready, we can just assemble them like Lego blocks'. And so, when you're talking about a whole footwear collection, it makes it really nice, because then you can create a really strong purpose in these little pockets for what your customers need.

There was this opportunity presented itself where we could go down the road of Merino clothing, but as that was developed, we realised that it was a very very high-touch product, um with a very low margin. And it was a distraction for the business away from that- that core purpose, and that core philosophy. Maintaining that core purpose, I'd, say is the best thing that Bobux has done over the past 30 years. Because it allows us to just make decisions really easily. 'is that- does that align with who we are and what we want to do?', and if yes then you know we'll go for it.

In terms of sustainability, I think our number one goal has been designed for longevity. What we found is that our products are such high quality that they'll last two or three kids, sometimes four different kids. That's led us to, I guess, increase that as much as we can, but also look at different ways that we can reduce our carbon footprint. One example is the new Grass Court Switch product that we just bought out that has replaceable velcro straps. Velcro is the number one thing that'll fail on our shoes, so by actually allowing them to be replaceable, it's going to extend that, you know, massively. Also, you know, there's a really nice story there for the kid because they can customise the different colors of straps and, you know, be either dressed up for a party or- or going to school. We're looking at different ways that we can then filter that out across the rest of our range.

[Philip Fierlinger]

Design is so imperative to our success and doing user testing is so imperative to our success that we really have to design something that is a game-changer, that is not the same old sh*t, um that we have to make something that is going to be radically different. We did have to... modify our road map to make this... this game-changing user interface, but it was well worth it, it paid off, it... established kind of the core foundation of both the platform and the business. It was an absolute game-changer, it's been the killer feature of zero you know from the get-go.