On your bike

 

From failed dot-com venture to international success story, Knog is a Melbourne-based design brand that launched in 2002 to produce bicycle accessories now sold in over 46 countries. Here Peter Salhani speaks with Hugo Davidson about the rise and rise of Knog.

 

Knog is short for “Knoggin”, an affectionate Aussie name for the top of one’s head. Knog is also the Australian success story of an industrial design company producing cycling accessories for a worldwide audience.

Hugo Davidson and Malcolm McKechnie set up Knog in 2002 as a project under the umbrella of Catalyst – the industrial design consultancy they run from Richmond, Victoria. Davidson is an industrial designer, McKechnie a product engineer.

After a failed dot-com project that used venture capital to develop technology and schedule advertising in front of supermarket shelves left Catalyst with a mountain of debt and a reduced but highly specialised staff, the pair had to do something to recoup their losses. The dot-com venture had taken Catalyst too far from its core of being creatively driven to investor-focused, so with Knog they were determined to reduce the stakeholders and grow the business organically, by securing overseas distributorships which allowed them to concentrate on their passion.

“We wanted to develop a business or a brand that we could add value to specifically through product design – one that didn’t have major benchmarks already in place,” says Davidson. “One of the guys working with us had raced in a former life and we all thought bicycles would be an exciting area to work in. There are a lot of players in the field, but they marketed mostly generic Chinese product, so it was very easy to make a difference.”

Knog began with a few prototypes and found an Australian distributor to test the waters. “An hour after they saw the first samples, they placed an order for 5,000 units and we were on our way,” Davidson recalls. Five months later he and McKechnie launched Knog at a trade show in Taipei and picked up 16 distributors.

Designed in Melbourne, Knog product is made in China, with exclusive distribution agreements delivering product to more than 46 countries. “We originally looked at manufacturing it here but found that most distributors wanted to buy from one port. China was the most logical, so we now manufacture through about 20 different factories in China,” says Davidson.

Product development is a key driver. Knog product is designed inhouse in their Melbourne studio- they don’t work with external designers – instead, they recruit across the disciplines from product and electrical engineering to web and graphic design. In the studio they cover every aspect from design and rapid prototyping down to the most minute aspects of product testing.

Project teams of designers and engineers from different backgrounds are switched across product groups for cross-pollination of ideas. Designers also time spend working at the Knog shop on Chapel Street, Melbourne, where they experience first-hand customer feedback as well as how the product looks in a retail environment.

The company does pricing research, to stay competitive, but has deliberately steered clear of consumer research on product. “If we asked people what they wanted products to look like, they’d probably expect something similar to what’s already there. We’d be one of the few brands in the market that didn’t originate from within the cycling industry, so our product is perceived as being a fresh alternative to 95 per cent of what’s out there.”

An approach that has paid off for Knog. In the 2009 financial year – in the midst of the global recession – Knog’s growth “slowed to 130%; the year before it was 280%. Backed up by distribution of new categories of products each year, then it’s very hard for the Knog model not to grow given the right pricing and the right marketing.

While Knog is on one hand a brand of cycle accessories, it also solves a problem common to many design businesses who take on staff for big projects, only to find there is not enough work when the project ends. Knog helps Catalyst iron out the peaks and troughs. In between Catalyst projects, the teams are releasing on average 8 to 15 new Knog products a year, and currently in the oven is a baby brother for Knog called Dirty, a gardening products label that launches some time soon.

Davidson distills two decades worth of lessons from running a global design business into a succinct mantra, laced with a little marketing speak: “You need the right brand story, good design, the right pricing and supply logistics, and packaging that stands out at the point of sale. All those things are critical to the success of a brand… You have tick all those boxes.”

By Peter Salhani.

Images courtesy of Knog, Eric Richardson and Steve Vance.

© Peter Salhani, 2009. All rights reserved.

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Published 09 September 2009.

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