Purpose as a guiding laserlight: an interview with Emily Brooke
I always have my best ideas whilst cycling. Something about the repetitious task of navigating the roads and avoiding danger allows the more creative part of my brain to stretch its legs, liberated from having to share space with life’s normal distractions. I’ve come up with several brilliant — or so I thought at the time - business ideas whilst cycling that never made it past locking my bike up.
When product design student Emily Brooke saw a van precariously turning left in front of her whilst cycling along several years ago, she pondered that cycling would feel much safer if she had a “virtual her” ahead of her to get the driver’s attention. Unlike me, Emily had the drive and talent to make her idea a reality. A student design project was followed by a successful Kickstarter campaign and in 2012 her company — initially called Blaze, before rebranding as Beryl last year — was born.
The company’s first product was the Laserlight, a bike light which projects a 2D image of a bike several metres ahead of you on the road. A virtual you, letting drivers know you’re coming up behind them. After a pilot with London’s public bike-share scheme in 2015 proved the Laserlight made bikes demonstrably safer, TfL decided to equip every single one of their 11,500 Santander Cycles — forever known as Boris Bikes (remember when we thought that was what he’d be best remembered for?) — with a Laserlight. The neon green silhouettes are now an iconic fixture on London’s streets.
Shifting from selling lights to cyclists to partnering with cities, the collaboration with London’s cycle scheme was the first major pivot as Beryl searched for new and better ways to get more people cycling. Their smart, connected lights were collecting valuable data and it opened up their eyes to the opportunity of becoming a service provider to cities, and this year the company launched what felt like the logical next step: their very own bike-share scheme.
It’s hard to think of another company that has transformed itself so often, so early in its existence, and so clearly in pursuit of a purpose. Earlier this year I spoke to Emily about the company’s guiding [laser]light.
Emily: We’ve had the same purpose since day one, to build a better world by getting more people in cities on bikes. Our first product did that by lowering the barrier to cycling by making it safer. We know that personal safety is the biggest worry for people who do cycle and the biggest barrier for people who don’t. Now we’re literally getting more people on bikes by doing our own bikes.
We always go back to that purpose when making decisions as a business, and more importantly, it’s a big reason why everyone at the company comes to work every day.
Me: Do you ever talk about getting more people on bikes as a business opportunity?
Emily: I mean, I’ve had to put a slide in the deck to investors to say cycling’s a growing trend, but I’ve never used it as a reason for doing what we’re doing. Our purpose is the reason we exist, making money isn’t. Profits are a way to pay salaries and for us to continue with the purpose.
Everyone in the team cycles in some shape or form. We have some coming into work trying to beat a personal best and doing Time Trials on the weekend and other just pootle in on a Santander Cycle.
We had a moment recently where we had an offsite with the team ahead of launching our bike-share platform, and it suddenly hit us that we could have 3,500 bikes on the streets of London, Hereford and Bournemouth by the end of our first year of operating bikes. If each bike was used twice a day, that would be 2.5 million rides. Which is crazy. That’s 2.5 million journeys that a good percentage of would have otherwise been taken by car or bus. That’s why everyone came here — that’s what we’re passionate about.
Me: Since starting Beryl how has having a clear purpose helped with decision making?
Emily: As a startup, there are always opportunities that come at you. There are lots of cool things we could be trying our hand out. At one point we got quite excited by the idea of doing apparel, but ultimately we didn’t think it was going to encourage people to start cycling.
We’ve been very lucky because our investors have always been very light-touch and allowed us to go in any direction we want to, but obviously, there are times when we need to justify the decisions we’re making.
It was about two years ago that we started talking about doing our own bike-share. So our own bikes, our own app, operations, service, maintenance. It’s a whole other beast, a completely different business. But once we realised we had the expertise and building blocks to do it we felt almost duty-bound to make it happen — it was a no-brainer. It’s happened way faster than we expected and knowing this is us making the biggest inroads on our purpose, it’s made us way more ambitious than ever before.
Me: As a company do you have any success metrics that let you know you’re on track with your mission?
Emily: Aside from getting people on bikes, if we want to make the world a better place we need to ensure everything we do as a company is contributing towards that goal. Becoming a certified B Corp has been absolutely amazing for that. We’re constantly trying to get more points. We have a quarterly review on B Corp with the whole team where everyone’s trying to come up with new ways to do better and improve our score.
We’re currently working on the KPIs we want to track once we have our own bikes on the streets. Previously when we were in partnership with other providers it was much more difficult to prove, for example, how many people our technology might have saved, or how many people got on a bike who otherwise might not have. But now we’re launching our own bikes there are some really clear metrics around the number of journeys and hours cycled. That’s going to be really fun to track.
Me: Bike-share is an increasingly competitive industry. What separates you from the competition?
Emily: Ostensibly we might look similar to an Ofo or someone like that, but their model is very different. Their vehicles are disposable. They’re put on the street, they don’t last very long and then they become landfill — which isn’t great. That model has worked in Asia where they’ve been allowed to flood the streets with millions of bikes. And they haven’t bothered analysing vehicle data because they are everywhere, and as long as one of them was picked up again it was fine.
With us, we want a few bikes to being ridden an awful lot. So the main difference is the utilization. Because of how we’ll use data, because of the technology onboard, and because of the service and maintenance model we use, we’ll make sure the bike are where they need to be and are being ridden. The bikes will be cycled a lot more. Then there’s the length of time the bikes are on the street for. Our bikes are designed to last years.
Me: How are you able to compete when the competition is having 100s of millions of investment pumped into them?
Emily: It’s back to the difference in our model. Our bikes are assets, and hopefully one day we can get asset financing — debt financing — as we can prove that once a bike is on the street it starts making money. It’s a capital bridging question, not a black hole of money.
Other companies’ bikes are on the street for such a brief period that they need a neverending production line of new bikes. They have to constantly fuel that hungry engine of demand for shitty vehicles with capital. And they do that by raising equity, which to me is completely bonkers.
But I’m not naive. If or when we decided to play on the international stage, we could do that much faster with a partner. So we’ve been thinking about who potential partners could be for that, not just in the capital sense, but other things they could offer us. Here in the UK, we’ve got a great big pipeline of opportunities and we’re funded in the immediate term to go after those. So I’d rather prove ourselves here and see what opportunities there are afterwards.
Me: Has being a purpose-driven company helped build partnerships with city councils?
Emily: It’s really helped. Being B Corp has given us a badge to stick on our company. Lots of companies claim they’re doing the right thing, but it’s really hard to prove. So for those who have known about B Corp, our certification has meant a lot.
I think it’s clear that we share a vision with the cities. They’ve all got targets around modal shift and sustainable transportation. That’s what these people’s jobs are that we’re dealing with, and so that’s the same as our purpose.
I remember when Mobike launched they claimed to be all about sustainable transport and saving the climate and now they’re merrily throwing their bikes into landfill, filling the world with plastic. Hopefully, anybody we’re dealing with can see quite quickly that we mean it.
You know, there’s a world where the private sector is overtaking the public sector. It’s really hard for cities to keep up with private sector innovation — so we need to work together. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if big contracts only went to companies who had made a commitment to something like B Corp?
Me: Lastly, why do you think air pollution hasn’t had its ‘Blue Planet moment’ the way plastic pollution has?
Emily: It’s a good question. Maybe it does need a documentary on primetime TV, but even then it might not have the appeal the oceans have. But you’re right, as real, genuine threats go, it should be right up there on people’s lists of concerns, but it’s not.
The statistics are terrifying. One of our team was in Brixton yesterday morning outside a school measuring the air quality so they could lobby the local council. Outside the school gates it was four times the EU’s recommended upper limit. It’s not acceptable. When she told the team we were in shock.
We’re currently working with a hardware company to see if we can get air-quality sensors in our bikes so we can then use that data to help the government. It’s a struggle to get it funded, and it’s tricky to get accurate data — the power consumption is also an issue. It’s not an easy one, but we’re working on it!
