How could you eat a mammoth?

If you’re not able to respond to this question, or you’re a bit lost on the topic right now. We’ll explain at the end of this post.

Yesterday we presented our latest work on our project and we’re coming to an end in the process and the semester.

We’ve explained several times what our initial challenge was: pursuing circularity for such a big company as BSH in the form of a new business model or adapting the one they currently have (all around Europe). This definitely sounds big as a mammoth 🤔

We knew BSH is doing some efforts towards new forms of business such as renting models (Blue Movement in the Netherlands). However this is not properly working at a large scale.

With time we came to understand what one of their mistakes was: their offer is too broad, and not for anyone specifically. They have a service that might work but they have no experience in offering it to the final customer, who, on top of that, behaves differently all around Europe.

Our biggest strength was, that (after all that research and failed attempts) we came to understand how people see the current environmental problems, and we know they are not convinced by the sole idea of sustainability in order to change their behaviour.

So we decided to redirect their renting business model and offer it targeting a specific group of people with specific needs: Real estate owners and managers.

Housing in Europe is complicated but around 40% of the properties are currently for rent, especially in highly dense cities, where thousands of flats are used for short term rental purposes. This helps us understand there’s definitely a measurable market for the idea.

These people have problems handling furniture and home appliances that require a big investment and maintenance, aka time and money they could be saving. They could be the perfect target group to be offered a renting service that includes maintenance, little to no initial investment, flexible renting contracts and installation all at once.

The idea has 2 other basic pillars: reduced catalog of products (those that work better for this model) and a structure of independent regional hubs to implement it.

Reducing the catalog by selecting only a few products that work best under worse conditions, are easy to repair, refurbish and recycle, and price that fits this market, helps make the service easy to manage, for both BSH and the final customers.

The independent regional hubs structure would be responding to the idea of low impact. Keeping products for renting always in the same physical area, even if they are used by 2 or 3 different owners over the years, would help reduce transportation. Each of the hubs would be placed strategically in a highly populated area with a big amount of rented properties, creating independent structures.

After creating a simple landing page (https://www.cloop.life/) and offering this service to the target group, we got good comments and also feedback from people in the industry (Fotocasa and different real estate owners) to shape the idea a bit better.

We’ll keep working on it for the next and final presentation!

But for now, have you been able to respond the question: How could you eat a mammoth?

Well, our answer: one bite at a time. This is how we went about our big challenge and we’re almost done with the bones ;)