The product

The TemBox – Design

The TemBox webpage – Online shop:

http://martineulvin.wix.com/thetempbox

The TempBox Elevator Pitch!

“Tempbox helps people on the move, such as, workers and students solve their lunch-time problems by providing them with the freedom of choice to eat whatever they want, wherever they want.

Tempbox provides a convenient, economical and, if you like, healthy alternative to dining out at fast food outlets or restaurants. It is also better than the traditional lunchbox because with the Tempbox your food will stay fresh until it is time to ‘be temped’, enabling you to eat any meal; hot or cold, simply by plugging the Tempbox into any plug, USB socket or car cigarette lighter to heat your meal of choice. And once you have finished with your Tempbox for the day, its flexible design allows you to neatly pack it away into even the fullest of handbags and backpacks.”

Our idea decision making process

In session 1 we were provided means of inspiration to be able to come up with ideas for a startup. We also got a tool for evaluating different ideas. After class all team members did some thinking and we were able to come up with a variety of ideas:

1. Motorbike Taxi Service
2. All training app
3. Self-charging solar panel headphones
4. Container recycling to build affordable and environmental houses
5. App for freelancing services (sell and buy)
6. App for world’s smoothest traveling connections
7. The heat -ble lunch box

We decided to evaluate them according by first asking: Does this idea solve a customer problem? Will people see the use of this product/service? Will they buy it?

After getting an overview over the members’ thoughts and comments on these questions, we ran the ideas through these criteria:

We gave the ideas points and concluded on “The heat-able lunch box”. It got a score of 19. The scores were high on Doable, Bootstrapping, scaleability, potentially global, usage of internet as channel. The scores were lower on disruption, innovation and if it would go viral.

In retrospect we are really pleased with our idea. We believe it to meet a need which has been unsolved up till now.

Stay tuned for the development of this amazing product by this even more amazing team!

 The Product Value Curves

To understand our product’s position in the competitive marketplace we have done an analysis of the Tempbox’s attributes. We look into which attributes in our Tempbox the customers appreciate the most, and how we are compared to our fiercest competitors. This analysis is called the value curve. Underneath we will present our analysis.

Value curves:

Firstly we will talk a little about the attributes. We chose the attributes based on an analysis of our product benefits, the competitors product benefits, and the customers’ problems. Following, we had a discussion among us based on the information we have been able to retrieve so far in this course in addition to some new information concerning our competitors. The result of the discussion where the attributes we believe to differentiate us from our three main competitors: Compleat, Tupperware and the Indirect competitors (restaurants, cafés, kiosks, and canteens).

We had 15 attributes on the table, but as we should only choose the ones we believe to be most important to our customers, we ended up with nine.

The resulting attributes are: Price, Heat-ability, Multi plug-ability, design, Flexivity, Dish-washer safety, Environmental, Variation in selection of boxes, and Food community. These attributes are developed based on the assumption that these are the ones where we are most different from our main competitors, and which we believe our customer segments emphasize and appreciate.

In the following sections we will describe each attribute and scale them and compare them for us and the competitors.

The Heat-Able Lunch box/ Tempbox:

As we can see from the chart we expect the Heat-Able Lunch Box to be comparatively less preferable regarding price. It will be more expensive due to the technology of heating and plugging, and also the design. As we have the heating and plugging system which we expect to be the major selling points due to the solving of important customer issues, we score the highest on these. We have plans for the design to be sleek and stylish and fit our customers’ needs and expectations. In our opinion the need for a lunch box to be dish-washer safe is an important attribute, hence ours will be. Further we are not confident yet that we are able to make the material sustainable and we are not planning on making several selection variations of the lunch-box. However, we are planning on making a community around the box. There will be an internet web-page to sign up to where the customers will find recipes for suitable lunch box meals, the opportunity to cooperate on making the food if working at the same place, forums for feedback on the product, customer service etc.

Competitors:

Compleat:

Compleat is the company which sells lunch boxes like Foodskin, Foodbag, Gourmet etc. These are boxes which have really neat designs for every need. They are mostly flexible, environmental and Compleat delivers a broad range of products for different needs. They also claim to have the world’s most flexible lunchbox. They are comparatively expensive, but will probably have a lower price than us. They do not have a food community surrounding their products.

Heat-Able vs. Compleat:

 

Tupperware:

Tupperware is a solid brand most people know. They make everything from potato peelers to boxes to different uses. In their assortment they also have lunch boxes. As we noticed after making the chart on Tupperware they have some few advantages compared to us which is of course the brand name, but when coming to the attributes: price and variation.

Heat-able vs. Tupperware

Indirect (Restaurants, cafes, kiosk, canteens etc).

In this value curve analysis we faced some problems. Restaurants and similar places are not directly comparable to the heat-able lunch box. However, we will use the same attributes for comparison reasons, and then we will explain the line of thought.

As we can see from the red line the indirect competitors score quite high on many attributes. However they also have a few disadvantages. In addition to the more expensive service, the are often not so attractive on “design” like the appearance of canteens and kiosks, and on the environmental side. In addition, not shown by this chart is the inconvenience presented by waiting time for the food or in lines, and the reduced opportunity to self-selection. For the attribute regarding heating we have given them the highest score due to the food being prepared at the purchasing time. Plug-ability is rather low due to the inconvenience of having to leave your car, work-place, the building etc. to get access to warm food. High scores are given to flexivity, dish washer, and variation due to respectively not having to carry and prepare food in a box, no need to dish wash and the variety surrounding a work-place can be quite extensive if one have time to go there.

The concluding curves:

In conclusion 

To conclude we see that the Tempbox is fairly good positioned in the market compared to the competitors. Our main strengths are the attributes linked to the innovative function of being able to heat the food. The other attributes like sleek and stylish design and the flexibility are attributes we score high on, but relative to the competitors they are not too impressive. Our main weakness is the price aspects. However, we believe the ability to heat and plug will offset the higher price.