Visionark, the automated cloakroom.

A group of university students had a great business idea that would ease the work load at busy manned professional cloak- and luggage rooms. These found at nightclubs, theaters, conferences, concerts and shopping malls. I was given the opportunity to join this exiting business idea plus the team of three university entrepreneurs. My responsibility was to create and execute a much needed market research plan. During the next 3 months we were all working hard on the market research plan which revealed some exiting results.

Before I joined the team and the business idea there had been a strong focus the product and how it could be developed. The idea was to develop a simple, easy to install and relatively inexpensive product that, in theory, would shorten the working procedure of handling coats at a professionally driven cloak- and luggage rooms. The strategy would then be to sell the product via the internet to whoever could benefit from using the product.

The team was already investing a few dollars on product development when I got the opportunity to join the team. Before joining the team it was my request to plan and execute a market research plan. The purpose was to prove the anticipated customer needs and to expose unknown customer needs. The market research took, all in all, three months before we had all the needed data.

Based on the collected data it was obvious that the anticipated inexpensive product was irrelevant to the customers. It turned out that the customers most of all wanted to minimize the manual workforce needed to run the professional cloak- and luggage rooms. Thereby it was our conclusion, that to succeed it would be relevant to develop a fully automated mechanical installation that could replace the existing established cloak- and luggage room man powered systems.

Unfortunately the team had no knowledge of building fully automated installations and further more the team had no interest in developing relatively complex and expensive automated installations. At the time this was also my personal opinion. Thereby the startup was no longer relevant to me or the rest of the team. Everybody decided to move on with other individual plans.