How I Tested That

David J Bland (0:2.159)

Hi and welcome to another episode of How I Tested That. Today's episode we have Janina from the Hansgrohe Group. They're based out of Germany. She is a curious business designer and a fan of user -centric innovation and pragmatism. Welcome to the podcast, Janina.

Janina Urbach (0:16.326)

Thank you David, I'm excited to be here.

David J Bland (0:20.494)

So I was thinking about when we first started corresponding online. And I think it was after I published the Testing Business Ideas book. And you had all these cool stories of experimentation that I wanted to get out there and try to get into case studies. And the timing didn't align up. But then we reconnected recently. And you're working on some really cool projects. And I just wanted you to maybe share some of those with the listeners. And the one I was fascinated the most with, I have to say,

is this idea of a dog shower. So maybe you can give us a little information about, you know, where did that idea come from and how it all got started.

Janina Urbach (0:59.250)

Yeah, sure. It doesn't seem super natural, I think, because at Hansgrohe we basically manufacture shower heads and faucets, but for humans. So that was actually, you know, like we always say, serendipity is part of innovation and nobody actually, I think, knows what it means. But in our case, it was really by accident that we found this topic of dog showering because we were in...

Janina Urbach (1:27.056)

interviews for a whole different topic, like it was something with sustainability. And then someone said, you know what, I really have an issue with my dog and showering. Like she's just always jumping out and I get wet all the time. It's such a mess. Could you not like do something about it? You're the expert in showering. And then at that time, we were like laughing like, haha, yeah, it's like a problem of one person, you know, whatever. And then.

like I think two or three months later, I actually got a dog myself and he's from a pet shelter. So he's maybe a bit more sensitive than other dogs. And that was when I noticed I had the same problem. And then I remembered, OK, someone else already told me about it. And at that time, I was introduced as a trainee in Hansgrohe So as a trainee, you always have your own projects and you have like maybe half a year or a year time.

Janina Urbach (2:22.802)

to do that project. And somehow we just thought, let's try it out, you know, do something around this stock sharing topic. The InnoLab was kind of freshly established. I think it's been there for a year and the first product was already like transferred to the core. So we were still looking for ways to find out how to do this innovating and use the same thinking and experimentation and so on. And we thought, let's...

Yeah, let's try with this training project, use structuring as a case, and that was the start of the project.

David J Bland (2:57.437)

So if I understand this correctly, you make shower attachments for humans and in the custom interviews, you hear these new insights, new insights from people trying to wash their animals, wash their dogs, and it almost felt anecdotal until you had a dog yourself and then personally experienced it. Did you find any other interviews or anything else of source of...

Janina Urbach (3:5.778)

Yeah.

David J Bland (3:26.089)

the need or the desire on the customer side where, you know, this seems to be a problem that is bigger than maybe we initially thought.

Janina Urbach (3:33.542)

Yeah, so I mean, first we did some classical desk research and you find out that the market for pet hygiene products is growing and so on. And then at the same time, there was a sales colleague from the US who told me that he gets asked by his customers for a specific dog shower because apparently, I mean, you can tell me if it's true or not, but in the US people are even more

Janina Urbach (4:2.034)

fascinated about their pets and their dogs. And they started a trend there with building in specific dog showers. Like they even have an own space just for their dog to shower. Oftentimes it's close to the entry door. So you can go right in after you come from the walkies and then you can show your dog right away. And also, of course, we did benchmarking and we found out there's already lots of stuff on the market. So we were then kind of alerted and thought, OK, there must be

something there. And also as soon as we started digging in and we were in this dog ecosystem, like we asked a lot of dog owners but also dog groomers, even dog psychologists and they said yeah it's really a problem. It's not just this one person or two persons but many people have this problem with their dogs that they just aren't really happy with the way showering is working and yeah that was how it went from there.

Janina Urbach (5:1.874)

Thank you.

David J Bland (5:2.894)

So I have to say personally that we have a dog who's a rescue and she has allergy issues. And so when we're bathing her, it's usually a struggle. She has a lot of anxiety around water for some reason, and it's not a good time, I have to say. So interestingly enough, just kind of pulling this thread. So you...

Hear this anecdotally, then you start backing into well the problem size here could be much larger there could actually be a market for this product did you jump to just building the the finished product right away of the perfect dog shower or or how did you test your way begin to test your way through that from the interviews to something that's more than just interviews?

Janina Urbach (5:51.922)

Yeah, so I mean, in the beginning, we just ordered all the benchmarks we could find. And then we had assumptions about the characteristics of each benchmark. Like, for example, we looked at the form or what kind of sprays they have, or for example, some look like a glove, others are more like a shower head or a hose. And then we actually just started by trying those and then had assumptions like...

this feature is going to help make this part of the process easier or stuff like that. And we also had some really really rough preto types. So there's a Hansgrohe showerhead, the Pura Vida, and we just changed the spray mat. So usually you know these nozzles in the showerhead, they're just...

You can't really see them because they're close to the surface. And we prolonged them with a 3D printer. And then this was more like a brush. And we were able to test what was going to be actually our killer feature in the end, this brush -like shower. So you can pet your dog clean because the water is going right into the fur where it needs to do all the cleaning. And you were also referring to your dog, so you can actually...

I think maybe understand the problems. If your dog has allergy or like skin irritations are a problem, then this is really important because all the stuff that remains in the fur, it's causing lots of problems. Otherwise, you really need to get it out. Yeah.

David J Bland (7:23.446)

I agree. I was thinking some of the things that you mentioned there. So one was this term, pretotyping. And I don't know if all of our viewers and listeners are familiar with that term. I first learned that from Alberto from Google, who had a pretotypid sort of pamphlet early on in the kind of lean startup movement. And then he's since published a book around that topic.

and I find that people use that book in conjunction with the testing business ideas book because there's some overlap in the experiments but not necessarily a large overlap in those. So when you think of pretotyping, maybe educate everybody, like what does that mean to you? Like what do you consider?

Janina Urbach (8:9.470)

So for me it can be a physical thing, it depends on the innovation, but in our case it was a prototype, but it was pretending to work. And actually we were able to just wash two dogs with it and then afterwards it just got really wacky and we had to throw it away. But yeah, it's to test the function that it's supposed to do when it's finished. And for us this was a really good way to...

test really important assumptions in a lean way and it wasn't really expensive, we just had to print and replace the spray mat. So, pretotypes, I think, also in our daily business and other projects are a really important aspect of our work.

David J Bland (8:55.713)

pulling inspiration from design thinking and.

I think it's brilliant and you mentioned 3d printing. Did you 3d print the entire device? Maybe explain a little bit about how you were thinking 3d printing. How did that help you learn what you what you needed to learn?

Janina Urbach (9:4.654)

Yeah, so for these first 3D printed pretotypes we used existing shower heads and cases and so on, but we just printed the spray mat and then when we went further and we started to...

construct our MVP series. We had to change a bunch of things because there were other features involved. And actually it's the first 3D printed shower head. So that's also a special side effect maybe. And our engineering department is really proud and I can understand that because it's such an achievement. Yeah, so that's really cool. And it helped us really to go to market really quickly because otherwise you would have to have this tool invest.

Janina Urbach (9:56.818)

so that people can have all this silicone and all the other materials and you have to do a lot of invest like half a million or more dollars to just have this hand shower. And in that way, we were able to just print it right away. And of course, the cost for like one MVP was skyrocketing. So it was, I think, over 100 euro. And with each sold MVP, we...

didn't make profit, actually it cost us money to sell these products. And that's paradoxical maybe, but it was perfect for us because we were able to prove that customers were interested and not only interested in the product, but they were willing to pay for it.

David J Bland (10:41.084)

Yeah, when you talk about willingness to pay, I often frame that as viability, right? And cost, can you keep your costs low enough? Will people pay enough for it? And then it feels as if from desirability, you were learning about some of the unmet needs, job swings and gains from the interviews and some of your scrappy research. So I'm wondering for these early stages, where did you find dog owners or were you mostly using your own dog? Or where were you finding people to?

test this with and also for folks that were willing to even pay for this. I'm just curious, how do you go about finding people like that?

Janina Urbach (11:19.418)

So in the beginning we actually started with friends and family and then as you know, groomers made its way through Hansgrohe there were lots of people actually approaching us and saying, hey, I have a dog you can also test with us. And also the first video materials was with someone from Hansgrohe who borrowed his dog. And then, yeah, for the more specific experts, we just Googled like where in...

near Schramberg, like our little village in the Black Forest, where can we find dog psychologists or dog groomers and so on. And then we just cold called and visited them. And later in the process, we started our Instagram page. And yeah, I'm telling you, David, if you're not into the pet-fluencer scene, you should definitely have a look because it's crazy. It's really, yeah, it's a lot of fun. And it was really easy to build a...

from there because there are so many people who just love to share content and exchange about their dogs. And so we built an Instagram channel there. I think at the end, when we transferred the project, we had like, I think it was 3 ,500 followers or something. So it might not sound that much, but yeah, for us, it was perfect because we had a community there and then we worked with pet influencers. So maybe as an explanation, that's influencers in the pet context.

And yeah, so we had a community there and sometimes we also used external testing agencies to recruit, but it was almost never necessary. I mean, we did it one time because the product claims we needed for the final product, we wanted them to just have been neutrally tested by another agency and then they recruited people for us. Yeah, but the rest of the times it just, I think it's a...

Janina Urbach (13:16.658)

It was actually easy, I would say, yeah, to find people.

David J Bland (13:18.543)

Yeah, I think that is one of the struggles from folks that I coach and mentor is how do we find our early adopters or people that we always frame that as do they have the problem or they aware they have a problem or they actively seeking a solution to that problem. And it feels as if going through pet influencers, which is a term I'm learning today. So people who influence on Instagram for pets and related products.

Janina Urbach (13:27.090)

Mm -hmm.

Janina Urbach (13:38.130)

I'm going to go to bed.

David J Bland (13:44.149)

It seems as if they already had a captive audience and it felt like a very nice mutual fit to test out your early stage product in a way where you already had people that potentially were your ideal target. I'm curious, you mentioned some other segments there. Did it ever occur or did you test out how to potentially sell to those segments or like groomers or how was that played out over the time of?

Janina Urbach (13:58.726)

Yeah.

David J Bland (14:13.845)

We're going to focus on consumers, but we also have professionals and maybe more of a B2B play. How did you all go through that process or did you find any interesting findings there?

Janina Urbach (14:19.666)

Mm -hmm.

Janina Urbach (14:24.466)

Yeah, we actually have a really interesting finding and it's we thought that the dog groomers they must be our early adopter segment. We thought so because they have to wash dogs daily and it's their job. And I mean, we visited one. It was like a day in the life of a dog groomer experiment. And I think he had like 20 or 25 dogs he washed in one day. And so we thought, well, it's such a high volume that

Janina Urbach (14:53.650)

They must be interested in a solution that makes their life easier. But it turns out these people do it like really professionally and they have found their workarounds because they already do it daily. And they have really different needs from dog owners. They look towards efficiency for themselves and to make their own life easier to have like an ergonomic showerhead and so on. Whereas the dog owners themselves, they're like...

Janina Urbach (15:22.354)

Oh, I want to make it really nice for my dog. I don't care if my back hurts. Just make it good for my dog. And so it was clear really quickly after like one day or I mean, we interviewed a few more dog groomers that they were totally different customer profiles with jobs to be done and pains and gains. And then we decided to go into this dog owner customer profile just because it made so much more sense. Yeah, numbers wise, because the market is just a lot bigger.

Janina Urbach (15:52.498)

and the need was much higher there.

David J Bland (15:56.050)

Yeah, I can see where that would be unexpected where you you feel as if this is going to be your customer. Of course, they're going to be our customer. And then you start digging into that and you realize, oh, they're not our customer at all. Because it's really disheartening. I think some teams and early stage entrepreneurs, innovators tend to just get demoralized at that point. But you also had this other segment, which was consumer segment that seemed to be more ideal for you. I'm curious what other.

Janina Urbach (16:7.652)

Yeah.

Janina Urbach (16:16.466)

Mm -hmm.

David J Bland (16:24.526)

situations or do you find yourself in as far as between the 3D printing and getting to a point where you have something ready to sell, I believe it's being sold on Amazon at the moment. What were some of the other experiments you tested through that process besides the 3D printing? Like what other things did you do that helped you sort of give you a sense that this is worth investing in or something is, this looks really promising.

Janina Urbach (16:36.818)

Yeah.

Janina Urbach (16:52.050)

Yeah, so I think what really was the game changer for us or the thing that gave us the validation and to really say, hey, it just makes sense to produce this product was our social media campaign and also the A -B testing on the website and the pre -sales. So we actually sold MVPs on a website. We had this test brand. We called it Furly.

And Furly was our name for the dog shower back then. And we just created Instagram and Facebook advertisement and then sent the traffic to a website, which we also just created for that reason. And then people could pre -order the product. And yeah, actually, it took us longer to send the products to the customers that bought it. But in the end, we managed.

And so it wasn't just a mock sale, it was actually a real pre -sale. Yeah.

David J Bland (17:55.057)

Interesting. So you were pretty much just hand packaging these and delivering them to customers.

Janina Urbach (17:59.698)

Yeah, that was part of our job. To just package them and then hand sign the address and so on. And so we did all of it. And I think it was really worth it because like that we were in direct contact with each step of the process. We saw what it's like to package the product, to send it out.

Like we also had so many customers asking us, hey, I ordered this like a month ago or two months ago. I need it now. It's like a birthday present for this or that person. And you know, not everything was super pleasurable and like happy. We also, yeah, we experienced it all. And it was nice because we also had this direct feedback loop to the customer. So if something didn't work in the field, then we got notice of it. And of course, during the MVP phase, that was sometimes.

the case. So, yeah, I would do it like that all again, I think.

David J Bland (19:3.249)

It's interesting, you're talking about a lot of the pains of doing it manually and not scaling, but from what it sounds like, you learned so much about the whole experience by doing it manually that I imagine that helped inform decisions later down the road when you started automating this and making it more scalable.

Janina Urbach (19:25.394)

Yeah, I mean, one really easy thing was we had to fix the packaging because it took us ages to prepare it. And of course, in a company context or corporate context, this doesn't make sense. Yeah, so that was one thing. And I mean, one reason was to learn a lot. But the other reason was just because we didn't want to jump many hurdles. You know, if we would have done it in a corporate context, I think.

that has many advantages if you're ready to scale and to execute, but we didn't really know would it work and are we on the right track. So it was just easier to not wake the sleeping lion, so to speak, just do it on our own. And of course, the colleagues from the headquarter were involved. So they were fantastic. They were supporting us, even the ones that were skeptical about the idea at first. But we had support from, I think, almost every. Yeah.

every team that was relevant, like accounting or logistics or IT and digital and so on. And actually, I think that's one of the that's the biggest benefit if you innovate in a corporate context, that you have this space and freedom to experiment and to test. But then you also have, you know, like there's an expert, I have a problem and I can ask this or this person and they will help me come up with a solution. So, yeah, that was nice.

David J Bland (20:44.459)

I think it's important to be able to ask for help and be aware that you need help, but then having that support in that environment is really critical to help this process have an impact. I was wondering, you mentioned A -B testing, and so what kind of things were you A -B testing on your website? Give us maybe a high level of what things you felt would benefit from A -B testing.

Janina Urbach (21:3.538)

Mm -hmm.

Janina Urbach (21:10.642)

Yeah.

Yeah, so we, I mean, it started even a step before during the social media campaigns. You mentioned this pain with the skin irritations, for example, and we weren't sure, is this like the big thing we should address or is it rather this emotional part like, oh, you don't like showering here, we have a solution. And for example, these were two different strands of communication that we tested even before people got to the website, just to check where the click rates were higher. And then on the website itself,

We tested stuff like different price points, but also product variants like colors and also the images. Like what kind of dog do people want to see so that they would buy the product? So it was a lot of fun actually. Yeah. And I think we could find out a lot about that. So we were able to, I think in the beginning we had a range of colors we tested. Then in the end we decided for only four of them.

And we also had a price point where we thought that's going to work maybe if we try to be more in a luxurious segment, but it's going to mean we have less conversion. Or if we go into the mass market, then you can see this drop where if you go, for example, below 50 euro, it was really interesting. You could see that people suddenly don't care about the color anymore. They would just say, OK, if this variant is like.

only 50 and the others are 60, then I go for whichever color is the cheapest. And stuff like that we found out over this A -B testing.

David J Bland (22:51.275)

Okay, yeah, so you may be testing quite a few things. It wasn't just colors, it was prices, it was a bunch of different things. So I'm curious through this process, what were some of what you would say like are your big successes? Like what were the kind of greatest insights you've had going through this process of going from kind of ideation of, we've heard this anecdotal story about a need for a dog shower to the point where people are purchasing them and you have pet influencers pulling in.

Janina Urbach (22:52.018)

Yeah.

Janina Urbach (22:59.248)

Yeah.

Janina Urbach (23:20.090)

Mm -hmm.

David J Bland (23:21.229)

and new customers and everything. What were some of your big successes you feel that you'd like to highlight for our listeners?

Janina Urbach (23:28.498)

I think the biggest one was that we always backed our decisions with data. So we might have had a gut feeling over the things, but then we always thought, how can we test this in an experiment? And that always helped us to decide because sometimes we thought we knew the right answer and it turns out we were wrong or we were already biased. And this just made it so much easier. Like it takes some of the pressure off of you and you can say, okay.

I just trust the user and the community to know what's good for them and then structure the product and the process accordingly. And I think what was good for us was also that we said, we don't have a fixed time point where it has to be done. So we knew, okay, it's a product or a project and we don't know what's going to come out. Is there even going to be a product that we launch? Maybe not. Maybe it's just a project that gets killed after half.

year or something. And that allowed us to have as many iterations as we needed. And I think this, yeah, it got clear that it worked quite a lot. And this was really good. And something that we also do in projects nowadays, which we started also was the inclusion of people from the headquarters directly. So it's not like we do our stuff in the InnoLab and then

We serve it on a silver plate and give it to the corporate and say, go do your execution stuff. But they were included from the beginning. So they accompanied us to the day in the life of a dog groomer or the customer interviews. They even washed dogs themselves just so they got the feeling, you know, what it's like. And people from marketing were there or from the product management and from engineering and.

I think this really helped so that it doesn't get lost in translations. Yeah, but experiencing it firsthand was really nice. Yeah. And last but not least, I think we had this testing brand I mentioned before. We were like totally undercover. Nobody knew this was a project from Hans Grohe. And that helped us not only because we could save Hans Grohe, you know, some people were worried that it's not going to be nice for our brand.

Janina Urbach (25:52.338)

So we could say, okay, don't worry. It's Furly it's not Hansgrohe, it's just Furly, a little Furly. And we can test there in that space. And for us, it also had the advantage that we didn't have any brand effects. So the feedback we got was directly about the product itself and no relation to Hansgrohe whatsoever.

David J Bland (26:13.158)

Yeah, I have some of my clients that do that where they'll spin up a labs brand or a project brand. And it doesn't mean they don't want to necessarily bring it on brand eventually, but early stage, I feel as if you get a lot of attention because of your brand and you don't necessarily need all that attention early on. You're trying to see, does this solve a real problem without necessarily.

Janina Urbach (26:28.274)

Mm -hmm.

David J Bland (26:36.516)

Attaching our brand to it, you know, you can just stand on its own without the brand And so I really love that you created the furly brand as a kind of a friendly kind of startup e vibe brand and then Did did you end up pulling it back on brand after it was successful or did the furly brand live on or how did that process go? You

Janina Urbach (26:47.890)

I'm sorry.

Janina Urbach (26:56.210)

Yeah, it lived on for a while, but then once it was launched under Hansgrohe we had to kill it. And actually we couldn't have used it, for example, in the US because there was also a shop named like that. So we couldn't, we would have had some trademark issues and yeah, that was also one of our smaller learnings to do this IP check early on in the process. And I think we also now we're much closer to the IP team.

just because we know that we messed up in the beginning. So yeah, we're trying to do better now.

David J Bland (27:31.174)

Yeah, IP comes up time and time again of it's like, how do you balance? You want to avoid building something nobody wants, but at the same time, you don't necessarily want to infringe on IP. And so there is a balance between when you think of all these experiments you're running, at what point do you go check to see, do we need to do a trademark search or something like that, or patent search or invention or all that. And so I do think it's a balance between staying in this customer free zone where you build the perfect thing and you make it completely

defensible but you don't know if it solves a real job versus I want to go find out if this solves a real job but I also don't want to necessarily have legal ramifications later. So I think it's a similar approach though that I've seen from other companies where we, you know, if it's successful you can spin down the brand and then bring it on brand for the corporate brand or if it's not successful it just kind of goes away and it's just another thing you've learned from. And in that regard I'm curious, so we talked about the successes.

Janina Urbach (28:8.818)

Yeah.

Janina Urbach (28:26.450)

Mm.

David J Bland (28:29.894)

What were some of the maybe missteps or unintended side effects or consequences? What are some of the things that you felt failed that could have gone much better in hindsight? What were some of those missteps along the way?

Janina Urbach (28:36.530)

Okay.

Janina Urbach (28:44.338)

Yeah, so I mean, I mentioned the colleagues. I think some of them we were onboarding really well because they were participating in the sprints and testings and so on. And then others, I think, unfortunately, we kind of forgot about them in the beginning. So I mentioned this issue with packaging, for example, and that was kindly feedback to us by the people who work on this line where they built, you know what I mean, the people who...

assembly line. Yeah, that's the word I was looking for. And for example, accounting, they had some issues because we never tested PayPal before. So that was like a totally new thing for them also. And I think we had some problems in the beginning because we didn't know that our customers aren't only external. Like it's not only about the dog owners, but to make it work, we also have to think about the internal customers and not to...

argue them too much, but to actually be with them. And yeah, that was one of the learnings, I think. And yeah, also the MVP in retrospective, I can say it wasn't really an MVP. So it was actually over engineered. And yeah, we had different features in the product. And then it turns out.

one of the features, it was only a nice to have feature. So not really essential for this MVP series, but we were kind of really excited about it because it was something also new for Hansgrohe. And then we thought, yeah, let's make it. And it's so the estimation was it wouldn't take that long to do. And we thought, okay, if it's just like one month development, let's do it. What's one month. But then it turns out it took like a bit longer and that's just, yeah.

delayed us in the go -to -market. And it also caused lots of problems in the field. So I think the MVP wasn't really an MVP. Yeah.

David J Bland (30:53.208)

It's pretty common where we think a lot of the nice to haves or must haves and we get excited and I'm wondering like what kind of problems were they creating like these extra features that maybe shouldn't have been a part of the initial test. What kind of challenges were they causing with your customers?

Janina Urbach (31:7.314)

Yeah.

Janina Urbach (31:14.290)

I think in retrospective, maybe the MVP would have just been a better version of this first pretotype we've had, you know, just this shower head that's existing with a different spray mat, but just make it one that doesn't break after you use it twice. And then that maybe would have been enough, but yeah.

David J Bland (31:35.672)

So what kind of tools, so we talked a lot about your tests and everything from interviews to A -B testing, 3D printing, and having these MVPs and pre -selling. Really, really a wide variety of tests to kind of pay down your risk. I'm curious, what kind of like thinking tools or visual tools did you use to manage that process along the way? Because that's generating a lot of different information. So what did you use to track all this or how did you kind of keep this sorted along the way and keep everybody in line with the process?

Janina Urbach (31:58.160)

Yeah.

David J Bland (32:5.626)

communication.

Janina Urbach (32:7.314)

I think one really important tool we use in the InnoLab, because everyone here speaks this language with the tools and so on, are the customer profiles and the value proposition canvas. So we always use those and also updated them and validated or falsified the assumptions on it and use the assumption map to prioritize our assumptions and then also to plan the next testings. And this one actually we also...

implemented one level higher because we have our Inno boards. So these are like these boards with our C level and decision makers. And for that, we also introduced the assumption map just to show them, look, this is like really critical. We don't know much about it. And here's how we're going to test it. So it was like one step higher, I think. And for us in our daily business, we structured the experiments with the testing and the learning cards. So.

Yeah, these structures really helped us to make obvious what we want to test and also the insights we gained from that.

David J Bland (33:15.859)

Yeah, I think it's important to document as you go along the way and find what tools work for you. So a lot of those I like that you have also have the HQ weighing in on and using the tools to socialize them and say, well, this is what's helping us. Here's what's most important with least amount of evidence. And this is why we're focused here. I do think it gives them something to respond to versus, you know, a bunch of bullet points and things. So that's really cool. I'm curious, how did you take all that learning and apply it to any new project?

or anything that's beyond the dog shower. It sounds like you've learned quite a bit along the lines of that project. I'm just really curious, how's that shaped what you do or how have you taken that and applied it elsewhere on your future project or current projects?

Janina Urbach (34:0.626)

I think it's a lot of, do you remember when we did this in the dog shower and it didn't work out or stuff like that in daily business? And we also have these regular meetings where we talk about our challenges with testing, like what am I going to test? And we challenge each other, is it going to work like that or should we try a different approach? And then it's also, we have monthly meetings where we have to present our project progress.

And I think lots of the experience we made, sometimes we have the situations where we say, we learned this or that in the other project, so let's not do the same mistake twice. So I think it's rather informal than like we don't have it somewhere on the wall or something. It's like the knowledge exists in us people and we share it with each other.

David J Bland (34:57.551)

I like it. It doesn't have to be completely formalized right away. It's more about how's it become the way you work, what works for your culture, and how you work in your industry. So what are some things that you're testing now that you'd want to share with our listeners that are beyond the dog shower? What's coming up as far as new ideas you all are testing over there?

Janina Urbach (35:21.306)

It's different, it's a lot in the sustainability area because for Hansgrohe that's a really important area for us. We think because we have so much to do with water it's our responsibility to be just really conscious about it. But one thing for the followers that might be interesting is the project WAVE. So this was together with a partner, Lovehoney and we actually launched that this year. So yeah, you can...

Janina Urbach (35:51.250)

also Google it and find out more about it. I think it's really exciting. And I think one last learning, which I can share maybe is that this was also only possible because we had a good partnership and we also found out in the dog shower project that this is the key because you can't be good in everything. So for example, if you lack the market access, then you need someone to fill in this gap. And for both projects, dog shower and wave,

This was the essential key to success, I would say, that made it scalable in the end.

David J Bland (36:30.124)

So it sounds like you're taking what you've learned from Dog Shower. It's changed potentially how you work from day to day and how you challenge each other and challenge each other's assumptions. And you're using it on new product ideas. And some of the new ideas you have, you're using those techniques there as well, which is pretty cool.

Janina Urbach (36:47.602)

Thank you.

David J Bland (36:49.804)

So if they want to learn more about you, where can our listeners learn more about all this cool stuff you're testing and more about what you're up to as a curious business designer?

Janina Urbach (36:59.822)

Yeah, so you can go to my LinkedIn profile. It's not that spectacular, but I'm there. And you can also follow Hansgrohe Group and the brands, Hansgrohe and Axor. Yeah, or just contact me on LinkedIn if you have any specific questions and I'll be happy to share.

David J Bland (37:19.211)

Thank you. Thanks so much for sharing the stories and all the insights into the dog shower and you have the wave coming up and it sounds like lots of cool stuff you're working on. So thank you for sharing it with our listeners today.

Janina Urbach (37:29.532)

Thanks for having me, it was a pleasure.