Don Rickert Research & Design Blog

Nimble Retreat from a Recent Business Miscalculation

At the very end of December, 2009 I posted an article on this site. To summarize the basic gist:

"While we will continue our work in the area of ground-breaking musical instrument (Adventurous Muse) and high-performance rowing craft designs, we will also be renewing our emphasis on being a full-service multi-disciplinary design research and product design firm."

This Was a Mistake!

I will be the first to admit when I was apparently wrong...well sometimes anyway.

The business climate for product design consulting is getting worse! At the same time, prospects for the musical instrument initiatives of Don Rickert Research & Design seem more promising. Don't know when we are going aggressively enter the high-performance rowing craft and other adventure product arena; they will remain on hold while we do everything possible to capitalize on the positive signs in the musical instrument business.

The reasons for this turn of economic events are a bit murky. Once I have a good well-informed theory, I will let you know.

Bottom line:

Postings on this site will deal more with a musical instrument businesses than the consulting business. We will try our best to keep the material on this blog unique from the the numerous daily postings on our Adventurous Muse blog. There will only be cross-postings when the topic justifies such.

For the most part, this site will deal with new developments; whereas Adventurous Muse will continue to focus on information, education and musical instruments that we are actually selling via the Adventurous Muse Store.

End Note:

Potential clients for our new product design consulting business should NOT expect discounted rates or free demonstration projects.

One last thing:

Our sincere empathy for all of the great small design firms that have had to throw in the towel or have been taken over by their venture capital investors owing to lack of work. A good reason to generally avoid venture capital, but that is another topic.

New Musical Instrument Designs at Adventurous Muse

At the center of the Don Rickert Design business plan revisions is our musical instrument operation, The Adventurous Muse. There will be radical changes in the coming weeks to Adventurous Muse and its associated Adventurous Muse Store. These changes will definitely involve dumping product lines that have failed to attract good customers...a good customer is a loyal customer who actually buys stuff. One set of musical instrument products that we WILL NOT be dumping are instruments of our own design.

In a recent post our Adventurous Muse blog we described our collaboration with Aalborg University on the Overtone Fiddle, pictured here, which will very likely be commercialized in time.

Of course, our Octave Violins, historic pochettes and modern travel violins are gaining world-wide renown and we intend to win some design competitions with some of these instruments in 2010...so those instruments are safe from the chopping block. In fact, we have a new Octave Fiddle on the drawing board as well as a really skinny (but full 4/4 length) travel fiddle that is extremely durable for the most punishing environments.

We have some concept sketches of the new travel fiddle, which we are currently calling the Rickert Mountaineer Backpacker Fiddle in a new post at Adventurous Muse.

Don Rickert Design Getting Back to its Core Business--Design!

Note: Cross-posted at DonRickertDesign.com

The adventurous business climate has prompted us to rethink our business model and tactics. While we will continue our work in the area of ground-breaking musical instrument (Adventurous Muse) and high-performance rowing craft designs, we will also be renewing our emphasis on being a full-service multi-disciplinary design research and product design firm.

For those who need details, you'll just have to wait until we figure out which of our business enterprises are worth moving forward with as the economy improves and which ones simply have an insufficient number of good customers to be worthwhile pursuing.

Dr. Don Rickert ponders our business future...

Click on the photo for a larger view.

  

For the observant Industrial Designers among you, that sure as heck is a genuine Eames Chair!

What Don Rickert Research and Design is Doing About the "New Frugality"

In the last posting, you got to experience a highly edited version of my rant about the media-fueled "New Frugality" and probably irritated just about everybody, as just about everybody is now part of the "Nouveau Frugal" class. Hope that I did not make you too mad.

Anybody who really knows me is well-aware that I would rather shovel manure (which is not simply an abstract notion, as I have friends who own a Clydesdale horse farm) than revise our business plan yet one more time. We are revising the entire Don Rickert Research & Design biz plan. I will limit my commentary here to highlights directly related to the part of our business related to consulting in the areas of User Experience, Design / Design Research, Usability /Ergonomics, Consumer Insights and Product Development services.

• We have reduced our rates slightly
• All contracts will now be on a "retainer basis", in this context meaning that 50% of the cost of a consulting engagement is paid up-front...this is so we actually get paid in a timely manner.
• Ramp up our marketing and networking to an unprecedented (at least for us) aggressive level and pitching our message to higher levels in our target client organizations...we have found that it is a waste of time to talk to people who do not have spending authority.
• Ramp up our ongoing reputation-building efforts...see the many endorsements on this site.
• Stay diversified, continuing to aggressively build our other divisions that produce our own products.

We are really good at what we do and it is essential that you either fund your in-house teams appropriately (we know that most companies don't) or hire us to protect you from product development nightmares that will show up when it is too late to do anything but clean up the mess.

Trying to Figure Out What to do About the "New Frugality" as it Affects Our Consulting Business

Every time I saw the last issue of Time (or was it Newsweek), I almost got sick (literally), because my academic training (Ph.D. from the George Washington University School of Business, admittedly in ergonomics and design/consumer research; not finance or marketing communications) and especially my experience-driven instincts told me that the media are having more fun than they have had in years creating self-fulfilling prophecies.

So now we have an official name for nobody buying anything and corporations twiddling their thumbs...the NEW FRUGALITY. I guarantee you that there will be an exponential increase in the phrase in anything written about marketing, product development, and so forth, academic as well as magazine articles.

Anyway, we are trying to figure out how to change our business message so that the "Nouveau Frugal" don't have us living under a bridge before long.

For us, the challenge is selling our admittedly "non-frugal" User Experience, Design / Design Research, Usability /Egonomics, Consumer Insights and Product Development services to large corporations that are not exactly keeping their collective eyes on the future. Otherwise, we are going to see a lot of new products next year designed by people not qualified to design products, much of this new product development work being out-sourced to cheap (you get what you pay for) off-shore sources. Those of us who have been around awhile know how well that works!

Don Rickert Research & Design has Begun Strategic "Adjustment"

CEO and Managing Partner, Dr. Don Rickert, has announced a radical redirection of his company's business strategy.

Don Rickert Research & Design, a design research and new product development firm also owns several spin-off companies, the most mature of these being Don Rickert Musical Instruments(tm), formerly known as Rickert & Ringholz Musical Instruments. The company's innovative bowed string instruments are sold through the online store, www.FiddleandBowStore.com. While extremely successful in terms of sales volume, in the words of Dr. Rickert, Rickert & Ringholz (now Don Rickert Musical Instruments) has been a "money pit." The firm has tried on numerous occasions to raise prices of its innovative bowed instruments to a profitable level and has met several major impediments:

1. Selling instruments at festivals (e.g. Fiddlers' Conventions, etc.) early on depleted working capital to a degree that the company is still recovering. The fact is that people don't actually buy anything but low-priced junk from festival vendors.
2. Professional musicians, an important targeted segment, have learned to expect companies to give them instruments outright rather than having to purchase them...it's tough to sell anything to a recording artist.
3. The customers that comprise the Expert-Level Amateurs segment are quite willing to pay a fair price; however, we are still learning how to most effectively market to this group of committed musicians. The ongoing learning process notwithstanding, this group has kept the company afloat and functioning.
4. Unrealistically low pricing in other product sectors besides musical instruments, made possible by outsourcing to developing countries, has turned the U.S. into a nation of bargain hunters with little appreciation for the cost of making quality merchandise. Our pricing research has proven this to be true...we can easily sell instruments at Chinese-made prices but not at reasonable prices.

Rickert says that the company has unwittingly trained buyers to wait for periodic sales on already marginally profitable discounted introductory prices, which have been necessary to raise operating capital. The number of sales generated on deflated prices have been a sustained drain on the resources of the parent company, Don Rickert Research & Design. Once you sell a musical instrument for a no-profit price, you still have to make the instrument!

The fact is that design competition awards, articles on musical instrument design and innovation exposition placements are far more valuable to a company that is, at its core, a design research and invention firm (referring to Rickert Research & Design), than meeting the desires of bargain hunters.

Rickert is quick to point out that there have been many good customers whose feedback helped immensely in the development of truly innovative musical instruments. He is also quick to point out that, while the U.S. economy at large has been bad, the situation has been abysmal for high-quality "luxury" items such as musical instruments handmade in America for at least 3 years, resulting in many small firms going out of business. Rickert refuses to let that happen to Don Rickert Research & Design, even at the expense of hurting people's feelings (such as some of the content in this posting).

While not shutting down Don Rickert Musical Instruments, Dr. Rickert has taken steps to VERY ACTIVELY discourage purchases by all but truly motivated buyers; thereby reducing backlogs of unprofitable sales. The first move was do away with most discounts and future sales. The second has been to increase wait times for orders by redeploying resources and efforts to more profitable initiatives of the parent company, Don Rickert Research & Design. The third, more drastic move is a radical increase in prices, to take effect in mid-April, which will almost double present pricing. A fourth step will be to NOT list pricing information at all in the Don Rickert Musical Instruments online catelog, sending the message that "if you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it."

There are several very musical instrument initiatives that will remain areas of focus. There is a separate posting about these areas of focus. They are:

1. Octave Violins
2. Synthesizer Violins / MIDI Control Surfaces

Other steps will include outsourcing of most production to a firm located near Birmingham, AL. There are no plans to outsource offshore...the instruments will continue to be high-quality American-made products.

The details of the above-mentioned initiatives, as well as others that Rickert is not ready or willing to announce presently, will appear in other postings.

Observation: Stupid Human Trick

Today's Observation (and I am in a good/prosperous mood today).

Maybe someone can explain how companies that build mission-critical websites and web-based applications might think that it is a good idea to BOTH lay off their internal User Experience, Human Factors, Consumer Insight, Usability, and related experts (or fail to fill approved job requisitions in these areas) AND manage to build worthwhile products without ANY guidance from outside experts (high-quality consultants). We saw what happened when companies started to do their own websites in-house (without in-house staff members with the necessary experience) and put a lot of good people out of work.

PANIC: the sky is falling!!!

Panic makes otherwise reasonable people do insane and sometimes unethical things (that's where our ability to rationalize comes in handy), and we seem to still be in I a panic-based economy. Oh, it's the shareholders fault...almost forgot that commonly-heard rationalization. Let me propose a different way of looking at the matter of what companies are supposed to do and how shareholders (I'm one myself) fit in. Companies DO NOT work for shareholders. Companies are supposed to make things. Shareholders are people like you and me who gamble on whether those things will succeed. Talk to friendly local economist about this.