Why a bike light?

Why would Mettle, a design and engineering studio, set about the task of designing and bringing to market a new bike light?

In our last post, Luke (our Design Director) introduced our Bike Light project (here), setting out our ambitions and the roadmap we’ll be following over the coming months. In this post, we thought we’d delve a little deeper into why we’ve chosen to explore bike lights. But first, why would Mettle initiate an internal project?

It’s always been an ambition

Put simply, it has always been an ambition of ours to do our own project. That’s a pretty good starting point but by no means the whole story.

It’s about working on every aspect of the product

It’s uncommon for us to work on every aspect of a product from the brand through to engineering delivery and everything in between. This gives us a fantastic opportunity to explore a full end to end project with total creative control.

It’s about bringing the whole team in

Having everyone on the team working on the same project is a rarity. We have a fantastic array of skills, covering the entire spectrum of the product development and delivery process. Having an opportunity to leverage all that talent into one project is extremely exciting and will bring the team together at a time when we’re geographically separated.

It’s about being able to talk openly

The majority of our work is conducted behind closed doors, especially ahead of launch. We all felt it would be a fantastic opportunity to open up our design process, to allow people to see the thinking, follow the process as it unfolds, the twists and turns and would enable a wider audience to input into shaping the products. It’s very much a ‘practice what you preach’ situation as we champion customer engagement and insight. This process develops a community around a product to ensure the design work is solving clear pain points or unmet needs.

It’s about being the client

We also thought it would be interesting to put ourselves firmly in the clients’ shoes and to look at the way we work in a whole new way. There is a lot of potential here, especially around improving the services we offer to the outside world, marrying up budgets with specific activities, understanding what really delivers value first hand, and could even lead to new service offerings.

(But really) It’s about having fun!

If you are not going to enjoy a self-initiated project, why bother?

So, this brings us to the point where, as a collective, Mettle is behind a self-initiated project. But why a bike light? There is no, one answer here but a catalogue of smaller reasons that laddered up to us feeling it would be an interesting, worthwhile and relevant opportunity area for us.

It’s not a completely new territory for us

We have already designed an award-winning bike light with Beryl (here). And so we already have some familiarity with the industry. As a team (broadly speaking), we’re keen cyclists, ranging from commuters through to crit racing and downhill mountain biking enthusiasts. All this valuable experience gives us a base understanding of the domain across a range of consumers perspectives. We’re well versed in the current market options and existing product pain points, as well as being genuinely interested in the subject!

It’s a rapidly evolving industry

Considering the bigger picture, cycling has been steadily on the rise in the UK, and as an industry, is going through some enormous changes. Admittedly, the UK is lagging behind the rest of Europe but changes are happening, and fast! From the explosion of e-bikes to digital platforms and, since Covid-19, changing behaviours around public transport.

Cycling has been ‘going digital’ for some time, with apps like Strava recording rides, as well as bike computers capable of feeding real-time data to the rider. Top-end bike computers are already delivering biometrics, power readings, and split times. In addition to essentially having sat-nav, even wireless gear changing is becoming commonplace on top-end bikes. There are also incredible new digital businesses such as Peloton and Zwift that are further expanding the cycling market. And in terms of smart mobility, bikes are a significant component of an evolving landscape of transport options.

So, with this all this growth potential in mind, the market feels a very exciting and extremely dynamic place to be right now.

For us, bike lights are an interesting aspect within this evolving world of smart transportation. Arguably, it’s a segment in decline with e-bikes having integrated lights.

However, we see bike lights themselves as vehicles for cycling intelligence which are going through their own rapid evolutions with new technology coming in all the time. There are already radar rear lights that detect cars and lights with built-in cameras, automatic brake lights and indicators.

There’s a wealth of opportunities in the smart cycling space, as more aspects of the cycling experience get digitised and connected. Lights are a critical component of the cycling ecosystem and it feels to us that there is an opportunity to bring something new to this evolving space.

I hope you’ll continue to follow our progress. We’ll be sharing survey insights next week.

If you haven’t already completed our proposition survey, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.