The business had aspirations of incorporating the learnings of its Imagine Project circular economy incubator into its core commercial activity.

Matt’s role was to scope out the engineering practicalities of adopting learnings from the circular economy business model into our everyday core business.

The core challenge was to better understand:

1. Real-world use cases

2. Our ability to simulate it

3. The duration our product could withstand it for

4. The anticipated sequence of component failure

Delivered the following programs of work:

• Introduced the use of data acquisition, FEA (finite element analysis) simulation and lab-based testing. Developed in collaboration with Faction Bike Studio in Quebec.

• Set up an in-house test lab with a match-funded Made:Smarter grant application to facilitate validation of FEA, assess impact of foreseeable misuse and perform in-field surveillance testing,

• Collaborated with the IMechE Argyll Ruane to build an NDT (non-destructive testing) strategy for the assessment of returned bicycle frames & forks.

• Product teardowns and lightweight LCA (lifecycle analyses) across components.

• Shifted NPD (new product development) strategy towards design for repair & material separability.

• Pushed for the publication of the brand’s first impact report and created all of the factual content and diagram frameworks.