A bike light with Mettle
Mettle is a design and engineering studio. We help our clients overcome complex challenges and build resilience through innovation. We’ve helped many clients design products but we’ve not designed, made, and sold our own product from scratch. Designing our own product is exciting, however, it comes with its own challenges. The buck lands with us, we have no excuses. It means creating an elegant, sustainable product with a delightful user experience. It needs to solve real user pain points gleaned through rigorous user research and hit a commercial sweet spot.
Consumer electronics often have short lifespans and too often get thrown away at a point we see as environmentally wasteful and brand harming. Electronics are superseded and mechanical parts fatigue, break, or become damaged. We’re striving to create something that can be fixed, updated and that will last. Our intuition tells us that careful planning and design thinking will lead us to a solution we would be proud to put our name to.
Why a bike light? We helped design the Beryl Pixel (an award-winning bike light) and have used LEDs on various projects so we’ve got the know-how and some great contacts in the industry. Bike lights are small and could be made using reductive manufacturing, this will keep MOQs and investment costs low. If the user research points towards ‘smart’ solutions, for us this will be a great opportunity to showcase our diverse skill set.
We think there’s a bit of a gap in the market. The bike light landscape is very crowded at the sub £30 mark but there are very few products available at the more premium end of the spectrum. And typically, the products that do occupy that space are very utilitarian, most are super bright lights with external battery packs designed for nighttime off-road trail riding.
To some extent the current model for selling bike lights is broken and out of touch with users. They’re sold as a seasonal refresh purchase through traditional retail, keeping margins low and creating a race to the bottom. We think there’s room to change and challenge this by offering better quality products directly to customers.
We’ve set ourselves a very high bar for success and to keep us on track, we’d like to do things a little differently. Product development is usually kept behind closed doors, only once a product has been launched do companies talk about the journey they went on. Instead, we’re going to have an open roadmap to show how we’re getting on every step of the way.
Our process: Every Mettle project follows a bespoke process comprising three flexible phases: understand, create, implement. We’re currently in an understand phase — building empathy with cyclists, understanding their goals and behaviors, and mapping out the rest of the market. We’ve conducted face-to-face interviews and we’ve got quantitative feedback from an insights survey. We’ve unearthed interesting insight and clarified which problems resonate most. Most of our users are concerned about battery life, light output, and making sure the lights are of high quality. By far the biggest frustrations are around forgetting to charge lights and other charging issues.
The next step is to propose some solutions to test if those resonate too. We’ll try to keep those solutions as unrefined as possible so users aren’t assessing how it looks or smaller details at this point.
If you’d like to get involved please take a look at our proposed roadmap or if you think you’re a potential user please fill out our user insights survey.
