Go to the Customers of your Customer

When trying to break into an established industry, common wisdom dictates that a startup begin on the fringes, far from what is held most dear. However, sustainable design company Tricycle went straight for the heart of the $12 billion carpet and rug market—its sales cycle—and converted the industry in just three years.

You read correctly, carpet and rugs is a $12 billion industry. Consider the carpet in your home, office, car, favorite airline, restaurant, and resort hotel. Then consider Dalton, Georgia, where half of the world's carpet is produced: a southern town that some might call “old school,” population 28,000, with two shopping malls and a golf course that has seen high-dollar deals on every hole.

Make no mistake, however—old school does not mean backward. We are talking about the fashion industry. Scratch any surface and you will find as much competition, design savior-faire and trendcasting as in any Paris showroom. Skeptical? Biomimicry is the word du jour in carpet patterns. Mod Mood Rugs were bought today for dormitory floors all across the country. Design trends are a way to mark time: another year goes by and last year's looks are out. The world spins.

Enter Tricycle, an upstart startup claiming that the sales cycle of the carpet industry is rife with unnecessarily wasted time and money, as well as unnecessary waste that clogs America's landfills. Tricycle's four founders have each worked in or around carpet manufacturers for more than ten years: a carpet designer who rose to entrepreneurial management, an engineer with a marketing MBA who started at a tufting machine manufacturer, a graphic designer who worked on carpet accounts, and the first Brit ever to put carpet software on the Windows platform. Bringing four insider views on the unspoken frustrations of manufacturers.

“For years, the mills had operated on an ‘If we tuft it, customers will buy it’ model, rather than meeting architects and interior designers where they live and work.”

Their common ground was the realization that the carpet industry's sales were manufacturing-driven rather than sales-driven, especially in the corporate sector. For years the mills had operated on an “If we tuft it, customers will buy it” model, rather than meeting architects and interior designers where they live and work. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the practice of sending product samples to potential customers, to attract business. An estimated 700,000 carpet samples are shipped every year industry-wide, at a cost to manufacturers that typically exceeds $150 per sample. Backlogs of requests mean that the potential customers wait three days to three weeks. What is worse, by their nature carpet samples are single-use products; most find their way to the dumpster at the end of a project, adding up to more than a million pounds landfilled annually.

Tricycle's founders saw other industries taking advantage of today's new industrial (r)evolution, enabled by digital tools. Music has become data. Images are recorded and transferred as data. Cars are built, driven and even test-crashed before a single rivet is popped. So Tricycle created SIM, the digital modeling of carpet. SIM from TricycleT manufactures carpet in virtual reality, creating samples that are viewable online at the click of a button or to order realistic paper prints that are color-accurate (a must in fashion markets). Since architects and designers frequently request twenty or more samples for major projects, Tricycle's simulation can be used for the early rounds of color and pattern choices, reducing the number of physical samples shipped. The print samples are delivered within 24 hours of request, and require zero oil, 95 percent less water and energy to produce than a physical sample. Recycling is as easy as walking to a paper shredder.

Simple as the concept may be, breaking into the established sampling process proved to be about as easy as crashing a tee time at the Dalton Golf & Country Club. A long history of failed promises from digital photography and "texture mapped" color prints had taught the carpet mills to doubt that paper prints could be color accurate and realistically show texture.

So Tricycle decided to enlist the voice of the buyer. Using their own design sensibility and experience, Tricycle's founders began a three-year campaign of surveys, awards competitions, informal and formal partnerships, and press tours to connect with architects and interior designers. They sold stock in their nascent company to attend NeoCon 2002, the world's largest interiors trade show, where they set up a booth with nothing to sell to attendees. Instead, they were out to educate the market about SIM. That first year, Tricycle won a NeoCon Gold Award, the equivalent of an Oscar in the interiors industry.

The company has won another NeoCon award every year since. Tricycle's design work has also consistently been featured in design annuals and awards competitions. This year, it is one of the recipients of Great Britain's Green Apple Awards for environmental best practices, joining past winners including Volvo, Honda and BP. The founders traveled to Copenhagen, where Tricycle was one of twenty-four finalists for an international INDEX: award for "design to improve life" (up against Google, Apple and Ford Motor Company). In January 2006, Tricycle was nominated for a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Corporate Achievement.

Tricycle's ability to connect with designers was built upon the founders' understanding that today's market does not endorse innovation as an end in itself, any more than it supports technology for its own sake. Design, no technology, the hub where new ideas meet—and even create—market demand. The timing could not have been better. In 2002 the interiors industry was experiencing the first big waves of a movement toward environmentally friendly design and construction, from groups such as the U.S. Green Building Association and the Carpet America Recovery Effort. Tricycle stepped into a gap that no one was addressing—the waste generated in the design process. Given that we live in the first time in history that we can create something without having to manufacture it, Tricycle's founders asked, why accept wasted time and resources? Why accept waste at all?

As the design community began to demand Tricycle's simulation, the company's sales team was ready to demonstrate how this demand was, in essence, the market giving manufacturers permission to cut sampling costs and drive products to market faster. Today, merely three years after the company's founding, Tricycle works with eight of the top ten commercial carpet manufacturers. In the past twelve months, nearly 35,000 SIM from TricycleT prints have been shipped to architects and designers, keeping 52,000 pounds of carpet out of landfill and saving manufacturers $4.7 million. Tricycle's product development services are also being used internally at carpet mills to prototype new products, enabling even further reduction of the environmental and economic footprint of manufacturing.

Such quick return on their strategy enabled the company to position itself for expansion into parallel markets. While spotlighting design to create market demand, Tricycle built internal capacity by accepting one-off projects from manufacturers. This has allowed the company to prove itself to each manufacturer on an individual, customer-service-centric basis, as well as to establish processes informed by opportunities and challenges encountered in real-world situations.

While delivering quick, capability-proving results and establishing repeatable processes, Tricycle has continued its relationship with the designer community, setting up a pipeline of information that helps to direct its growth. Younger designers in particular, schooled in digital tools and environmentally sound design principles, have embraced Tricycle's call to refuse design waste. In response, product manufacturers from a variety of markets have sought out Tricycle's founders for consulting and services. New opportunities range from floorcovering mills in Europe and Asia to a new carpet brand that will use only virtual samples, to companies in other sectors including textiles, wallcovering, and furniture. By proving itself in a market that was tough to persuade, Tricycle has positioned itself as ready to address the problem of design waste generated by every surface, in every built space, in the world.