Keeping finnish industries competitive by design thinking - Herrmans

As a bicyclist I was thrilled to see a Finnish bicycle part manufacturer Herrmans seeking for a industrial designer the other year.
Not only that at some point I had spotted that the company might use some design thinking, but in the end because my good friend and extremely talented designer Mikael Heikkilä got the position.

I have been eagerly waiting to see the results of his design efforts and it really starts to have an effect on the brand previously known for OEM manufacturer.

I just replaced original Specialized grips with these Endorfin 3D grips.
I love the tiny detail and the caring thinking in how he has marked the left and right as well as the up directions. Marking these directions means that I can push them with ease and confidence to the bar and that just makes me feel good. -A feeling that is sometimes hard to justify in the R&D meetings, but makes a significant effect on the customer.

 

Design story - Gässling underwear

Marketing sometimes fails to deliver the original design intent to the customer. Since the contradiction between design and marketing has been intriguing me, I was really exited when I had the chance to discuss with Joakim how a garment that now supports a whole new underwear brand Gässling was designed and is now marketed.

I wish all the best for Joakim and I just checked that you can still order some treats for christmas ;)

The name
In short, Gässling is a Swedish underwear brand that makes premium eco underwear for style conscious men. From the very beginning we wanted to create a brand based on Swedish values that was primarily focused on an international market.

We knew that we wanted to use organic cotton and that they should be manufactured in a responsible manner and we needed a brand name that could reflect this as well as look Swedish. The name should fulfill these criteria; be Swedish but not look strange in English, speak of nature, have a local connection to Malmö where we’re based and to be easy to remember.

We started to analyse different traits of nature and eventually we got hooked on the goose. We thought it was a good animal for us because there are lots of geese in Malmö and it has very sympathetic traits. For instance if a goose gets injured during flight, another goose will stay behind until it gets better or dies. It took about 1.5 months and a lot of debating to come up with the name Gässling, which means gosling in Swedish (goose baby).

The product
It’s usually said that in order to break into a saturated market your product need to outperform the competition tenfold.
I wouldn’t say that our underwear is ten times better than other underwear but we have done our very utmost to create some killer garments. We tried to list all available pain points and address them one at a time. Some details that are worth mentioning are that we don’t have a care instruction tag inside, but they are instead printed for better comfort. The waistband is covered in fabric for a smooth feel and there are no seams in the back or sides of the garment to make it as clean as possible.
Our second - more aspirational product is the first ever (as far as I know) tight fitting boxer with an openable waistband. To give it an extra exclusive look we used fabric covered buttons that were all custom made to match the color of the main fabric.

What’s next
We have now been online a few days and even though we are still very far from sold out we can see that the main traffic is coming from outside of Sweden and predominately from the US. This tells us that we probably made some correct decisions when creating the brand. Now we need to turn those page views into purchases but if we succeed with that is another story.