Making the most of your design - Martin Darbyshire, Founder, tangerine

John Coldham: Hello, my name is John Coldham and I am a director in the Intellectual Property team. I am joined by Martin Darbyshire, Founder of tangerine. Welcome, Martin. Thank you for joining us. Can you start with telling us a little bit about tangerine?

Martin Darbyshire: tangerine is a design consultancy. We have three offices. We work in the areas of innovation, strategy and design and we help clients to break new ground and develop new concepts, own distinctive spaces spanning from experiences through to physical, tactile products that you buy and use in your life.

John Coldham: Your company has designed a number of things over the years, very different types of products for different types of market. Perhaps you could start by telling me a little bit about one of your most famous designs which was the Yin-Yang BA Fully Flat Bed in business class. What were the key challenges in relation to intellectual property from your perspective as a designer in coming up with something like that, and perhaps tell us a little bit about how you developed the product.

Martin Darbyshire: So I think the most difficult thing will always be understanding what the value of something might be in the future. We work with very different businesses in different markets and we try and guide different clients as best we can in terms of what the opportunities might be. But we would always recommend they go and seek advice from an expert because it is absolutely critical to adopt the right approach. So, in terms of our work with BA, the most important thing we have learnt from that is the outcome and success is so difficult to predict and the results can be quite surprising and you need to be very careful about what you do to get things right.

So I have to rewind back in time a bit and take everybody back to about 1998. British Airways then had reclining chairs in business class. They were seeing the market decline and they were looking for a new concept that would help them to transform their business. We created a concept called 'Lounge in the Sky' which offers a lie-flat bed for the first time in a very space-efficient format. BA patented that with what is now known as the Yin-Yang configuration so it is a seat facing backwards and a seat facing forwards. For the business or for the person travelling that brings, for the traveller, an emotional benefit – they are in their own space, they are in control of their time, they are not all facing forwards as they were doing on every other aircraft and combining forwards-facing and rearward-facing gave the ability to include eight seats across the width of the aircraft which then protected the density. So we tend to use the term "getting the perfect balance of density and desirability". At the point when it was launched though, still nobody had any idea how successful it would be.

Looking back it has been phenomenally successful. It has protected density, it remains the profit engine of British Airways to this date and it has helped them really fundamentally protect the success and maintain their business. Had I have known that at the time, we might have approached the commercial side of our arrangement with the client in a slightly different way from the way that we did but certainly it has been fantastically good for us as designers in terms of building our reputation and growing our reputation and we have certainly learned from that process and would do things slightly differently in the future.

John Coldham: So obviously BA were very good about protecting their rights in their product. Have there been any instances of where you have worked with a client on a product which has gone on to be very successful but a key component of the design has not been protected by IP?

Martin Darbyshire: Yes. I think the example I have just given of British Airways is similar in a way to a specific example in working with our client Pace Micro Technology. So, again, going back in time, back to the late 1990s, Pace were becoming leaders in creating set top box technology.

They perfected converting analogue to digital and that enabled them to deliver content through the satellite or via cable. So they were an OEM manufacturer to a number of providers of cable or satellite technology. One of their key partners, Sky, together with them they created the idea of combining a set top box with a personal video recorder and through that created Sky+ as a new technology. I think, in that case, their focus was always going to be on how do we create the right product, how do we create the right service and how to do make it be successful, particularly as, for the first time, because of the cost of the technology, they were asking customers to buy something rather than just subscribe to a service, which was a really important differentiator for them commercially. And then to pause.

But the key issue for us through the design of the product was helping understand how the value of this device would become understood by customers and persuading customers that it was something that they were going to invest in and it was worth investing in. At the time, TiVo had been developed as a technology, it was moving from video cassette recorders to hard disc-based storing and, even then, that product was not successful because people just were not really aware of the value. They were not familiar with shifting television in time and moving things around as we are now.

We developed the ring of LEDs, working with PACE, as a means of explaining to people that this box can freeze time. You can press pause, you can answer the door, you can come back, press play and TV will have shifted a space in time and it made it very obvious at the point of sale what the benefits of the product were and through doing that, through that simple invention, we were able to really unlock and be persuasive about the value, and the uptake of the product in the end was phenomenal.

John Coldham: You were using the design to educate the consumers?

Martin Darbyshire: Yes. Absolutely. Neither Pace nor Sky applied any form of protection to that concept. They did not consider at that point in time it was so fundamental. Sky now use it as a key component of their brand. It is totally, utterly interlinked with their brand and Pace, had they had protected it, would have been in a much stronger position commercially and with one of their customers in terms of controlling their destiny in the future. So there is a key lesson in that the ideas that you generate are very wide in nature and the applications you need to think hard about by diversity of application.

John Coldham: That is very interesting. The two examples you have spoken about offer an insight into working with blue chip companies. But is IP protection only important for big corporations? What would be your advice for an entrepreneur who is trying to take their product to market?

Martin Darbyshire: We certainly do work with a number of small companies and an example that I am referring to is actually working with individual who still for his day job is a hairdresser. He began life as a steel worker on the docks in Glasgow, realised his career was not lying in that space and moved out of that, became a hairdresser and, through being involved in giving hairdressing demonstrations around the world, realised that there was a tool that could be useful.

He created the first version of that product himself. He worked with a local toolmaker in Scotland. They developed a product and over a five year period, he built up a pretty successful business selling these tools off the stands where he was at hair cutting shows. The reason he decided to come to tangerine was though because he was being copied and he wanted to secure greater differentiation, he wanted a wider product range and he wanted something different from the current product to extend his portfolio and secure his business. In terms of protection, he did register the design of the original design in the US and Mexico and in Europe.

He did not patent it because, even though I think there were inventive elements of it, the costs were just too high and over time he has really relied on promoting his brand, developing his brand, trade marking the names that exist so that the people that buy it know they are getting a real one and, as he would say, also not being too greedy about what he is trying to achieve and being careful to manage his margins, so using a careful approach to supply chain, selling through just a distributor network that he knows well and managing the business very carefully.

But, certainly, I think now that we have unregistered design rights, if you are trading just in the UK or in Europe, then there are very obvious powerful ways that you can look to protect your design. But still, of course, we would always refer people on to experts to get the best advice they can because it is a very complex space that we are trading in.

My advice there would be you definitely need to talk to experts about what you are doing but the type of protection that you might need makes it relevant. It can be very varied in some respects, unexpected as well.

John Coldham: Martin Darbyshire, thank you very much.

Martin Darbyshire: Pleasure.

John Coldham: I hope you found this podcast useful. We have produced a guide aimed at the non-lawyer, all about the designs lifecycle and the different considerations at different points. Please contact us if you would like a copy. Thanks for listening.