Strategic Incubator Case Study:

Company: Sweet Pea Bicycles, Portland, Oregon

Target Focus: Custom made bicycles for women

Overview of Sweet Pea Bicycles: (Watch Videos)

sweetpea bicycles from daniel sharp on Vimeo.

Natalie Ramsland, Founder of Sweet Pea Bicycles is featured in these free promotional videos. Some produced local in our home of Portland, Oregon and others produced by HP feature.

I’d like to point out some key marketing points of this project:

• Personal & Professional brand reconciliation. Natalie is a former Portland bike messenger that identified a problem: We need bikes custom built for women. She has the “look.” We noticed very quickly this pierced & maybe tattooed (Portland Cyclists Rite of Passage) 100lb bundle of energy is both evangelist and artisan. The girl can make a custom bike-not just ride one. In summary, she “reeks” of her brand extension of women who re-imagine a new way to get to work in style. In a recent mention in Outside Magazine, Natalie is described in a DIY section-”In a league of distinguished gentlemen-and one bad ass bike building gentle-women.”
  
• Artist, not a manufacturer. Natalie’s artistic brush stroke is not a paintbrush, but rather a welding iron. We viewed her as a niche expert in the already established artisan community of craftsmanship in Portland. At a cost of $3,500 dollars and a 16 month waiting time, you better call yourself an artist. Yet enough people are willing to wait and pay for an artistic expression that can be theirs vs. buy it on the spot at a local store.
  
• Lives in her ideal market place. Natalie lives, works, and plays in her market of Portland, Oregon. Portland is voted the #1 bike friendly big city in the United States. Attractive pixy women pedaling their custom made Sweet Pea bike in the bike friendly streets of Portland, much like Amsterdam, are a moving billboard.
• Marketing to women. Sweet Pea is not trying to be all things to all people. Just cute girls with pierced noses wearing scarfs and a beanie around the streets of Portland.
  

• Sweet Pea, the brand name, just sounds like it fits. Natalie says in this video, “I wanted to have a term of endearment. Why not be plain about it.”

• Authenticity “molded” to brand. Sweet Pea bikes have meaning to owners. When owners are asked by people on the streets of Portland while chaining their bike to the plentiful bike racks in the city where they can buy one of those bikes…owners don’t want to say, “at any bike store or REI.”

• Visual brand comparison metaphors. We always encourage you to be able to answer, “What brands do you admire either within or outside your industry?” This enables you to plant a brand memory that people can possibly link to your brand. Why not benefit by “attaching” yourself to your most admired brands. Natalie even provides people with a Talking Logo (John Jantsch & Duct Tape Marketing) when she says she admires Patagonia as a brand “because they build stuff for people who don’t want a lot of stuff, but what they have, they want to be meaningful.”

Strategic Incubator Recommendations:

• Website needs a kick-stand. Sweet Pea Bicycles website here can use some major, but easy improvement. We recommend a Brian Gardner Revolution Two Album theme as seen here to really highlight the visual emphasis of the custom bike process. The argument can be made by some people that the simplicity of the current blog site is of minimal importance because they are busy building bikes. We say to those people…that is a lame excuse. For free or for $59 dollars Sweet Pea can convert their entire website to a platform that reconciles on-line the artistry displayed off-line in actually making a custom bike.
  
• Monthly Progress Video. Every month Sweet Pea should provide a personalized 5-minute progress video on each bike under construction. The video would then be uploaded to a section of blog for all to admire, but especially for the future owner to beam with pride with public adulation. This re-purposing strategy not only provides the person who is having a custom bike built with a progress report, but also builds a community of future Sweet Pea customers peering through the “virtual store-front window.”
  
• A dedicated testimonial & recent press page. Every Sweet Pea bike owner is asked to prepare a 3 minute or less video of their experience. Each testimony video has a simple viewing rating system underneath the video for anyone to rank their favorite Sweet Pea experience. The monthly winner who created the voted upon most popular Sweet Pea experience testimonial wins a quarterly free bicycle tune-up compliments of Sweet Pea. Right now, Sweet Pea is placing testimonials and press coverage in a blog format. The problem is since a blog is published in date sequence, the testimonials and press coverage will be buried vs. a dedicated page that is easy to find and view.
• A 1 hour a week Friday Sweet Pea Mogulus Live Stream. Mogulus is free. Here is the concept: Sweet Pea chooses 1 hour every Friday to have a webcam in the Sweet Pea factory. If Sweet Pea is a Mac, a great webcam is already built into her Mac computer. If Sweet Pea is a PC, they can buy a $58 dollar Logitech video webcam and connect by USB. Sweet Pea simply answers any questions about the custom bike building process. People can see the bikes in various stages of completion in the background and may ask whatever questions they like. Natalie may even invite Sweet Pea bike owners to interview. A simple Twitter message to alert interested people and Sweet Pea is live! See the video below to see how Mogulus may work for Sweet Pea:

Strategic Incubator Brain-Jam:

• Is there any part of Natalie’s story that is your present or hopeful story?
• Name your ideal Vision Brand Comparison Metaphor?
• Should we conduct your case study?