sugru

Branding, Strategy and a whole lot of other stuff for an amazing new invention.

Overnight success

This is a story of an overnight success that took 6 years of hard work.

sugru is the brainchild of Jane ní Dhulchaointigh, an Irish inventor based in London. We began working with Jane in 2005 and have been part of her team as the company has grown from one person with a great idea, to an amazing team of product developers, scientists and production specialists.

sugru is a completely new type of wonder material – a hand-mouldable self-adhesive rubber that cures at room temperature. Once cured, it’s heat-proof, water proof, lots-of-other-things-proof and feels great.

After years of blood, sweat and technical development, we all knew that this was something special. Jane had invented a creative, game-changing material that enables its users to modify, adapt and make their stuff better for them.

It was a material with a mission, and when creative people got their hands on it, they used sugru to do extraordinary things.

All or Nothing

So sugru was great, but it needed some serious investment to follow its business plan. Nobody except a very small handful of visionary investors were willing to take the risk.

After visiting over 100 potential investors, Jane had only 6 months’ worth of funding left. But, finally, she had a product ready to sell. And we knew that creative people wanted the product. Jane had met them. We’d met them. We even had some stolen from our studio. So, together, we formed “Project Sugru”, and hatched a plan.

Simply put, sugru and Atto would scrap the business plan, do everything ourselves (with more than a little help from a few talented friends). We would show the world what it looked like when a passionate group of people jumped off a cliff together.

“Atto Partners are so much more than designers and developers. From day one, they were driven by understanding the core purpose of our business and helping us to achieve our goals in the smartest, most delightful way we could imagine together. They are genuinely part of our team, and we are lucky enough to be able to think of them as insiders rather than consultants. ” Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh, FormFormForm

Launch

We worked with Jane to develop sugru’s launch plan, customer experience, brand, message hierarchy, packaging design, advertising and the sugru online shop.

Then we helped Jane put her story, and her mission, out into the world.

She started an online conversation with people who cared about the same things as her through videos, blogging, social media, support and sugru workshops. We helped Jane build the company she wanted to work for – one that treats its customers and employees like royalty.

And guess what? It worked. sugru sold out of 2 months stock in the first 16 hours of sales. It attracted an untold amount of international press and an order backlog that would take months to fulfill.

What happened next

All of a sudden, sugru didn’t have any problems finding new investors to scale up. Over 200 potential investors came to Jane, and she picked the few who really got her vision.

After a 6-month scaling process, we helped sugru officially relaunch in June 2010. It’s going from strength to strength, with tens of thousands of customers in 63 countries.

We’ve done tonnes of work for sugru over the last couple of years — from packaging design to a bespoke multi-language, multi-currency e-commerce system — but the thing we’re most proud of is helping Jane to ignore everyone else and do what she thought was right.