Innovating the Mobile Lifestyle

Chris sits down with McKay Featherstone of THOR industries to explore innovation in the RV and mobile-lifestyle space. They also dig into portfolio strategy, culture and risk, and practical leadership advice for scaling customer-centric innovation across organizations.

Transcript

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Welcome back, everyone to Seriously Curious, a podcast, all things UX for business Strategy and Design. I'm Chris Rockwell, I’m president and founder of Lextant here in Columbus, Ohio, where we're working on keeping the people we design for at the Center of Innovation and Design. And I'm super excited today to have McKay Featherstone with us, internationally recognized product development and customer experience design leader, currently senior vice president of innovation for Thor, where he's working on the future of recreational vehicles for mobile lifestyle. And, I'm really excited to hear some of these stories, but specifically, I'm excited to hear about your work on iconic brands like Airstream, Jayco, and Keystone, and then also some of your impactful work on safety for, you know, children, with your work for Evenflow so, I’m super excited to have you here. Thanks for taking the time. Welcome McKay. Thank you. Appreciate it. You know those bios always sound very grandiose, but I have had a chance to do some fun things, so looking forward to talking about it. In fact, you mentioned Airstream, which is a brand, that I work with and lead design at for many years. And really, that arc of my career has bent towards this outdoor lifestyle, helping people be more mobile and designing those experiences for them. Yeah, let's let's start with that. I mean, tell us a little bit about your journey. You were at Purdue University and then Indiana University. And how did you how did you get into this career? Yeah. So I don't know if that's probably bad career advice, but literally my journey has been doing things that I always said I didn't want to do. So I'll walk you through it. There's something in there around, like liking a challenge or, you know, learning and stretching. But, so I've an engineering degree from Purdue, and there was a point where I absolutely did not want to be an engineer. So I tried my hand at that and enjoyed that for many years. Business MBA degree from Indiana University, kind of same thing. I never wanted to go into marketing, so of course that's what I did next. Even a little bit of sales and some other steps. But my career has been mainly a blend of technology. So engineering as well as marketing and understanding customers, customer insights, you know, segmentation with, I think, a passion for design. So I've had a chance to lead design at a couple of organizations, but it's not because of my training, you know what I've learned. It's because I think at least I was able to recognize the power of design, and, and be able to translate that to a business context. Yeah. Which, I mean, couldn't be more important today especially, you know, so it is interesting how when you think about big D design, it includes so many different kinds of disciplines. I think your unique path to it is is interesting and impactful. Wha- what motivates you? Like what gets you up in the morning when it comes to this kind of bringing new products and services to market? Excellent. There was a point in my career where in fact a designer helped me find this. For me, it's a funny story. So I'm in my 20s working in consumer electronics, and so on the engineering side, doing, you know, packaging and shielding and things and all that. And so you have to work with the design community to make sure you get everything to very thin, beautiful television package. So we're just hanging out, talking, and he says to me, you know, McKay, you realize everything that we ever work on just gets thrown away in the trash. He must've been having a bad day. I don't know what was going on. I still, to this day. I don't know why he told me that. Yeah, but it really, that really hit home that- because I was kind of envisioning this as my future and career in electronics were cool, and I liked having the biggest TV at home. But then just struck a chord he’s- he’s right, like all this love, sweat and tears goes into things that people keep for a few years, and then they throw them away. And that was really one of the drivers that said, okay, I should find more purpose in my work. So you fast forward a couple of years, and I had made a jump over into child passenger safety. So car seats, we've got, you know, parents out there very familiar with, you know, infant seats up to booster seats. And really being in an organization where the mission is to protect children's lives and to help make parenting easier. And so I was able to find that purpose that that drove me through that. And then as we talked about mobility, I was really just thrilled to find, with Airstream, that same, same sense of passion around that lifestyle and the experience. And really, it's about people making memories with their family and the kids and the grandkids. And so that's really been what drives me, is wanting to take the time that we all spend and things we love to do and, make a better world out of it. Yeah. You know, our mission here, at Lextant is to transform people's lives through the things that we make, you know? Yeah. And, and I think in the process, hopefully, you know, transform businesses to, to be more successful and more competitive and differentiated. Yeah. Yeah, I, I'm with you the same thing that gets me up in the morning is the opportunity to design something of value, through really deep understanding of people and what motivates them, what they need. And I think, you know, your child safety work, what could be more important than what could be more emotional, you know, for parents- Yes.-trying to protect their children and want that, that security, but then also for mobility. You know, I always say mobility is is fundamentally about freedom and empowerment. You know, it doesn't matter if you're if you're creating an EV or you're creating a the next generation Super Cruise or whatever it is, you know, it's ultimately about freedom and empowerment. And there's nothing that, you know, the, the recreational vehicle and the mobile lifestyle kind of industry. Nothing is more emblematic, I think, of that freedom and mobility. So tell me about that. Like, when you think about the growth of this mobile lifestyle business, and the opportunities and the transformation that it's been going through, tell me what that journey has been like and how do you productize and innovate for that? Excellent yeah so, I've been in the recreational vehicle industry for about 12 years. Everyone calls it RVs. But but really it is about that recreation connecting with the great outdoors. And the fundamental driver there is, is a desire to connect with nature. And for me, that is really, it's a very encouraging trend that if you look gener- generationally because sometimes RV and you might think, oh, it's older because you need the time, those sorts of things. But people love to be in the great outdoors. And so you are productizing a way of making it easier to do that. A traditional, if you think about a funnel into that lifestyle would have been tent camping. So people that grew up tent camping or maybe, you know, camping in an RV of some type, you know, trailer of some type, you know, switching then over and eventually buying one. Today we see a lot of rentals that it's easier for people to try the lifestyle out, because with peer to peer rental platforms, they've got a way to actually go try it out, see if they love it, and if they do, then they can, you know, buy vehicle and use it more frequently, use it more often. And Thor Industries, which has Airstream and all these brands also has a rental- it looked like it's some sort of rental component to it too. So it's really more about it's about the whole ecosystem of it. So tell me more about the opportunities. Like how do you identify what those opportunities look like and begin to think about how an RV can be more than just an RV? Yeah. Great question. So at Thor Industries it's the world's largest RV company. It's around 45% market share globally. Biggest markets are the US and Europe. So we're talking about North America and Europe for the most part, with RV. And really with that growth in that much shares the from a business standpoint, you know, one of the drivers is to look at how do you continue growth for a corporation when you know you already have such a large share in a market? So you start to look at adjacencies and an ecosystem around that. And so from a strategy standpoint, there's opportunities here for growth for the industry. And one of those is simply to grow the pie. Right? So you can always fight over share and of course you want to grow share a couple of percent. But you can actually get more people out in RVing, you're going to build your business, I think actually more effectively when you've got that much market share. So kind of growing the overall pie for RVers a lot of that is helping overcome these friction points that exist. I think of it as RV is something people enjoy doing, right. You can have you stick a campfire or you're going to go out and take a fishing trip. Whatever it is, you know, you do that because it's fun and it's time with your family. But there's a lot of there's a lot of doing as opposed to enjoying, right? Just all these friction points. And it might be booking a campground. So if you start from a product standpoint, what do I say is not the right place to start? You start with a product you would go towards, “Yeah, how do I make this hook up easier?” Right. And then that might be an improvement to the customer experience and important but in this broader view of a lifestyle, you really have to look at the whole ecosystem. And what are the biggest pain points and opportunities. So, one of those opportunities was, as I mentioned, this peer to peer sharing and rental as a way for people to come into the lifestyle. So the business challenge there would be how do you connect those things? Because in traditionally you might say, well, if they're going to rent an RV, they don't have to buy one. So you might look at it as competition, but I think is business leaders as innovators, you can flip that around and say, well, is that an actually an opportunity? It's basically, you know, rent, is a trial to purchase. Yeah. Now you can start to envision an opportunity to connect those two things together and literally digitally connect those two things together. So if someone rents and they have a great experience, that's a great time to hand them over to start shopping for an RV so they can continue on with that lifestyle. And so high level strategy about market and growth opportunities, you know, then into ecosystem. And really what are the what are the actual biggest pain points. So not looking at it from just my little point of view, but more broadly. And then you can actually find, you know, friction points that you can design out. And I'm sure the folks interested in your podcast could envision an actual user experience for booking a campsite. That could be done much more easily, mobile website or even in the vehicle itself. Right right. So so it's almost like a customer journey, but like, from, out to end. Right? A macro to a micro, getting them in the lifestyle and then keeping them in there. Yeah. Yeah. This is like one of the most expensive things you could ever purchase. So it's not something somebody is just going to write a check on a, on a whim. Like, I hope this is something I'm going to enjoy. Yeah. So I love the idea of giving them first moments of truth where they can begin to understand and project themselves into a future. Is this a future I want to have? And the renting, is is a great way to do that. Part of the way to give them the experience of it. And then they get the bug and then you get them deeper into it. Exactly. But but then there's also, you know, there's been when you think about a mobile lifestyle, a lot of people want to take what would traditionally be, say, their work life and maybe do it in this context. Right. So it seems like there's been a lot of a transformation of like, well, I don't have to work chained to a desk anymore. I can work from the mountains, or I can work from my campsite or whatever. Tell me about that. I mean, because that's that was not yet, you know, that wasn’t possible- Yeah.-15, 20 years ago. And now all of a sudden it's like, maybe I can do this. Tell me about how generationally that's a shift. And and from an innovation standpoint. Excellent. Yeah. And you mentioned freedom before. So I think of it primarily there's freedom of space. You just want to travel and explore and see new things. You're talking about freedom of time. Now you've got time that you can use in different ways that you could before. One thing that I really appreciate about Airstream, you you said you couldn't do it 15 years ago. There's always something in the past of someones done it before. So literally their founder. I don't know the technology, but he had, a phone where he was out caravanning and including, like, in Africa and other places, and he would literally in this trailer call back, to the office and say, this thing broke. This needs to be better. You know, let's actually improve. One of those big old satelite phones or whatever- This is like 1950s. I don't know what they were using, but it was really hard to do that. Right? That was expensive. You had to be the CEO of a company to pull that one off. But today, it's, the technology is there to give people more freedom for how they want to use their time. Connectivity is a big deal for our customers. In fact, there's some, really foundational research. And this is something I found in my career is very helpful to certain research that's done that has a ton of insights that you can use. It's years worth of work to actually, you know, deliver against those insights. This was actually from KOA, KOA is the nation's largest, was a franchisee of, really great campgrounds. So they do a big research report every year. They found that if customers have good connectivity, they're going to camp longer. They'll actually they want to be there. This kind of freedom from a work standpoint is great for them. So if they're connected, they will actually camp longer. That's something that, you know, obviously is going to inspire you to say, okay, well, great. How do we actually deliver on that? So one important approach was providing better connectivity solutions. And in this industry that's really hard because people want to go where the cell towers aren't. So Starlink was the perfect fit for that. Not a lot of folks know it, but Starlink actually works better where there's fewer people. So it's not about like density of cell towers. It's the opposite. It's how many people there are in that satellite area. And so we partnered with them. You know, obviously we weren't going to go design and build our own system. So we partnered with Starlink. Thor Industries was the first to integrate that into the vehicle itself. Customers obviously could go out and buy it, but then you have to set it up and point it and there's more work to it. We did the work upfront to integrate it into the vehicle and then put together a business program, a pricing program that was better for RVers and better for our customer segment. That was really successful. Customers are generally very happy with the level of connectivity, and so they're able to camp longer. And if they do that, stay in the lifestyle and actually buy a second vehicle, a third vehicle, or even a fourth vehicle. You make a two day trip a four day trip. Yeah. And and then but then you have the challenges of, well, now it's not a place where I'm only relaxing. I also need productivity. I need. So now it's my office and stuff too. So it gives you opportunities to further innovate. Yes. So, you know, tell me a little bit about that. How, you know, it's not about putting up a canvas tent and camping anymore, you know, now you've got some pretty amazing, technology at your disposal if you really want to get off grid, you know. There's a technology component to it and I found also some pretty important customer insights. So this is an area where we did ethnographic research and really got deep into understanding customers that were doing it because, you know, you got to love it when you see customers putting together a system and kind of making it work. Love it. So we spent time, watching how they were working and really understanding some of the deeper emotions. So important things there. There's a real sense of fear if you're working remote and you don't have connectivity and it goes out now, you're the person, the suddenly it's in front of everyone. Okay, well, they're not here and they're not connected. They're going to miss out on the meeting or if it's a little bit spotty. So there was this really surprisingly strong, attachment put to connectivity, but also the space that you're in. Right. I've worked with a, gentleman who worked from his boat for many years. And I appreciate how he did that because, like, the first couple of years, you never got to see the background. Yeah. Right. You didn't know where he was? And once you get to the level of trust, then you can see, okay, like, you're in the Bahamas, and that's beautiful and amazing. So we actually did design some vehicles that had a space dedicated towards remote work, and understanding what's in the backdrop, you know noise control all those sorts of things was even more important, I think, than in a home office, because you needed the vehicle to convey, I'm working. This is not a vacation. Like that's that's really important. So we designed basically a space that communicated to others that you're at work even though you had this mobile lifestyle. One other thing I thought was really impactful and, just a cool insight from, you know, doing the research is that with this idea of work and you have a work life balance and vacation and travel, the thing that really attracted people to that is reducing the time to get into the outdoors. Basically, you're going to work a full day, but once that day is over, you literally can open your door and you're exactly where you want to be, right? You're not packing things up, taking the big road trip, all of that, that that was the insight from the customers was that by bringing their work life with them, when the day was over, they were instantly now relaxed and doing the outdoor adventures they wanted. Interesting. Speed to play. Yeah! How fast can I play? That's really good. That's exactly it. Yeah, yeah. But I love that idea, too, of thinking about the emotional aspects of working off grid. Because we all have an interpersonal brand, right. And there's when that breaks down on a remote meeting or whatever, like it happens quick, you know. Yeah. And so the ability to sort of maintain the perception of you and your brand or, because I had that same experience. It's interesting how the tools have begun to compensate you. I can blur my background if they don't want to show too much kind of thing. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, these are emotional things like, how do I establish confidence and trust in the- in the things that I'm investing in, speed to play. How do I how do I better take advantage of the opportunities I have in my life to relax or play or be where I want to be? And I think that that, certainly pre-COVID, but even post-Covid now you're seeing more genera- generationally, people are just like, I'm going to prioritize my free time. It's beyond work life balance now. It's something else. It's like this work life integration. That's exactly it. So that's that's interesting. And I think maybe interesting implications for the RV industry or the recreational lifestyle, you know. Yeah, certainly it's it's great for the lifestyle. It's good for the industry. Yeah. And from a, from a business standpoint, one of the I think important insights off of that because I'm not a designer, a lot of great designers out there and great researchers as well. But when you get into that emotional territory, there is less price sensitivity. So some of this technology is not cheap. Yeah. If you look at an average person and, ask them to pay for Starlink, which I think now at the time maybe $150 a month, it's it's not cheap. So you might wonder, is this something we should take on as a business? Are there enough customers out there willing to pay this much for this to make sense for everybody or not? But when we had that, instead of really understanding how important it was to them, you know, their personal brand, like you said. Yeah, okay. We decided to to go for it and actually put it out in the market. And it was successful. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the emotional aspects of it, it's really about value. You know, at the end of the day we think about like the emotional and functional benefits that you get from an experience that translates to value. And if there's high degrees of value then people are less price sensitive. Right. Because they know they're getting a high return on it. Right. And and this is, you know, I think about customer investment when people buy a house or buy a car or buy an RV, they are invested in it like both emotionally and monetarily. So it needs to pay off. You know, that they're sensitive to ROI. So being value driven, it may just make so much sense. I love that that let's talk about Airstream for a minute. I mean, I think about Airstream. There aren't too many other like iconic brands like that. That's like retro futuristic thing. And I imagine having innovation and design responsibility for that probably causes you some sleepless nights, like, how am I going to innovate around this without like compromising what, you know, the iconic style. So that so tell me a little bit about how you manage that. In your time at Airstream and with Thor. Yeah, excellent. One- actually, no sleepless nights. Oh thats good. It I attribute that to the strength and the clarity of the brand. Right. And and it's hard to describe, you know, what it's like versus if you haven't had it. But when a team is aligned, the mission is alive in the building. Just things get easier decisions. You don't have to wrestle as much as decision because you've got clarity of where the business is going. So I'd love to share a couple of examples of what that looks like. One is the the, almost identity of the founder. Wally Byam founded Airstream 1932 ish, actually out in California. He built the company and his vision is still alive. So, I credit to Bob Wheeler, who's the CEO there. But at a strategy retreat, we literally brought a cut out of cardboard cutout of Wally Byam, like, stuck him in a chair. And he was in the room while you're talking about- yeah. Weekend at Bernie's kinda thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But, like, it was just a nod to, you know, having that, spirit still alive. One of his sayings that's carried forward. And during my time I, you know, helped to carry that forward as well. Is that let's make no changes, only improvements. Interesting. So it's the it's the antithesis of the planned obsolescence of the design cycle where it needs to be look fresh and new to, you know, new colors. Here's the new model year. And that's really, I think, you know, unforeseen consequence. But it's helped Airstream become an iconic design because you don't change it just to change it. So if you look at one today, it's not that different than it was ten years ago or 30 years ago, because it's a really good fundamental design. It's aluminum tubing and riveted. It lasts forever. And so I think the brands become iconic because they've got that focus on only improving things. But you said something really important earlier, which is the the difficulty in a business context is, yeah, they're beautiful. But if you make your money selling new ones now, your challenge is how do I convince a customer to buy something new? It looks exactly like a used one, which could be 30 or $40,000 or more less for the used one. So you have to keep on- it's almost like a positive treadmill. You have to keep improving it. Yeah. Because if you don't, there's no reason to buy a new one. And then Airstream won't be a healthy, profitable company. So we focused, yeah, we from a cultural standpoint, we focused on improvements. Didn't mess around with the styling and the of, you know, the of the look of the vehicle to try to attract customers. But actual functional benefits in some examples air conditioning. So of course these vehicles are the house on wheels. You've got air conditioning in a lot of RVs. You'll see an air conditioner that's kind of just blowing air right in the living space. It's really loud, much louder than it would be in your house, where that air conditioning unit is kind of outside of the house. So with a new design for the system, we were able to move the air conditioners out on completely on the roof. And all of the ducting so it operated more similar to your house dramatically reduced the noise. And that actually brought customers in to buy a new one. So there were customers that owned an Airstream. So at that point, I guess you have a used Airstream. Yeah. And it was a reason for them to actually come in a buy a new Airstream because the experience was so much better for them. Yeah, yeah. So it doesn't mean you can't innovate, right? I mean, you and we talked about value focused innovation. That's an example of value focused innovation. But you can do it without changing the signature design language or the iconic things that make it what it is. Yeah, exactly. Advanced battery systems, solar or, you know, water recirculation. Those are all about the resources you need to go where you want to go and stay there. So you talked about freedom. It's one thing to get there. But if this is off the grid, if you actually want to stay there for a week, you need those types of resources. So I found it easier to innovate because of the constraints. This is something that really has become foundational for me, that there's compromises, right. And compromise typically not a good thing. And there's constraints. And we say, okay, that these are givens for our business, our design DNA. Yeah. And you just work within the givens. You make those constraints beautiful. And so we had a lot of success. And again, it was easier because you don't spend time debating things you don't need to debate. You know, the constraints. The team is aligned around those. And then you now, you know, we work and go focus again. Things like power and resources or connectivity actually makes it easier. Yeah. That's interesting that those constraints or are freeing, right. Because you know what you can and what you can't do. Yeah, right. And, or you know what you, should do, you can focus on what you should do and not knowing the constraints that you're under, I love that. Yeah. And I think it's it's, a rare position that a brand could have such that sort of iconic status where people travel to the facility. Yeah, to tour it and to visit. You know, we've worked with, like, Harley-Davidson, or Indian Motorcycle has some similar kinds of things. You know, like some of the work we did with Indian Motorcycle was like, okay, well, we want to put a new, infotainment system on Indian motorcycle, like, well, how do you do that in a way that doesn't violate some of these constraints about what it is and what it stands for? Yeah. And, and you can do it. And so maybe those constraints are freeing. That's an interesting maybe design principle that you could take, you know, into all of our daily work like, okay, what's what are the constraints. So we don't have to worry about that its freeing. Yeah. It's really interesting. And I and I think it's also you shown it that it's a great way to keep people in the lifestyle, to keep them purchasing, and not just to spend money, but to actually get incremental value. And so you can just kind of decide where you need to be. And maybe, maybe there's people who don't have the opportunity to invest that kind of money that can maybe still experience the iconic brand- Yeah.-through maybe a use platform or pre-owned or, you know, kind of thing. And Airstream is actually gone further. So very, you know, kudos to to Airstream with this. Think about accessing a lifestyle. Right. And you said it early. It's just the second most expensive thing a customer would ever buy, probably less than your house. Not always. They can get expensive, you know, then you've got, a trailer, an RV, and then a car. So it's really expensive and you don't actually need one. We'd love to say you have to have one, but you don't. The, it has a value, but you don't need it where you, for the most part, need a house. Need a car. Right. So there's a real challenge there. So one of the opportunities is to lower the barriers to accessing the lifestyle, because that's a high barrier I have to go spend. And if this is Thor industries, it can still be $30,000 to get into a vehicle up to $300,000 so that the barrier is high. How do you reduce that? You mentioned we talked a bit about rental. And rental is way so you can try it and it's a few hundred dollars now, okay I love this, I'm going to go do that. The Airstream actually has vehicles that are hotel rooms literally. So this is called ‘Auto Camp’. Started by some great entrepreneurs that had the vision of basically building a hotel. So I think outdoor tourism, you know, type of facility that it's all Airstream trailers. And now they've expanded, across the nation. So there's one out, I think Martha's Vineyard, Russian River, and just envision it looks like a campground. Yeah. Beautifully landscaped. There's going to be a lodge, but everyone's got the fire pit and they've got this beautiful Airstream, which actually is designed as a hotel room, literally. So these are made in the factory in Jackson Center, Ohio, not too far from here. And there's a spot for your luggage. There's if you don't need it, they've taken it out and then they've provided a bigger bed, a bigger shower designed as a hotel room. Wow. So in this instance, you just literally show up with your suitcase, and then you can have a beautiful outdoor experience with your family. So they've really gotten that down, at least as far as I can envision the lowest possible entry. It's exciting because it's a chance to convert customers, but also you find the lower those barriers are, you get, you get customers you never see right? Right. People self-select. I'd like to do that. I'd love to own a boat someday, but it just feels like it's too intimidating. So they never even make it into the funnel. But if you get that down low enough, you find there's lots of people. They've dreaming about it. They think it's cool, they've seen it, and now they're willing to try it. Yeah. And so you can expand again, grow the pie, expand the customer base. Another first moment of truth, right. You're giving them ways to access it to get into the lifestyle. Yeah. I love that idea. Yeah. I'm gonna have to look that up. I'd love to stay in that, you know, something like that. As opposed to, you know, Holiday Inn or your courtyard, right. I will say, yeah, as we kind of go through all this, sometimes these things feel like there's grand strategy for all of this. A lot of this is so just organic, opportunistic. I find keeping an open mind to the possibilities is really the magic. If, if, if kind of whether it's business leaders or design leaders or just focused on here's, here's the brief and exactly what it says and kind of, you know, I've got this task to get done. Yeah, you'll get that task done. But these kinds of things happen with a broader mindset. A willingness to try something different doesn't have to be a grand strategy. It can be, openness to the possibilities. Yeah. Well, I think that's where some of great innovators, how they work. I mean, they're, they're, hyper noticing. Right? The, the world. And if you think about what it's like to travel and to stay in a hotel. Yeah, that's sometimes the worst part of the experience. You have to endure it in order to enjoy the place that you want to go see Yeah. So, you know, the kind of work that we would do in research, right, to understand current experiences and desired experiences could reveal a lot of those kinds of things. It can happen organically, of course, and, opportunistically. But I think there can also be a real purpose to it as well, you know, and you wouldn't have to look too far to the to say, “Hey, what?” You know, “What's painful about a travel experience? Well, you know, just the plane ride in the hotel.” and, you know. Yes, I do have to say this, I don't know if you'll appreciate this or not, but whenever I travel and and flying somewhere, and if I have a bad experience, it makes me happy because it means more people are going to want to go out on the road and take an RV trip and not deal with airports and all that. So it's good for my business. It helps offset- That's a great way to look at the sunny side. Yeah for sure I appreciate that. Okay. So that's amazing that you can innovate within that kind of world within Airstream that you mentioned. I think on a call the other day that there's an Airstream museum. Yeah. And your work is in the museum. That has to be amazing. What an amazing feeling. Tell us about that. It's. Yeah, it's. Yes. Thank you. It's super cool. And maybe a couple of thoughts around that. So Airstream you talked about customers actually coming to so Jackson Center Ohio kind of the joke is its the center of the universe for all things Airstream. Been there since the 1950s. So manufacturing is all done. All of it for the world is done in Jackson Center. It's amazing community, of people there. And maybe five years ago, they built, a heritage center to be able to tell the story for people that were coming really to do the factory tour. That was the draw. And you can do this today.

So I think it's 2: 32:58

00 every day of the week and encourage people to, to check online for that. And you can come and actually watch Airstreams being built. So you actually had busloads of people showing up. Now we can also tell the story of the brand and the history of the company. And the collection of Airstreams is amazing. Going back to the 1930s all the way up through to today. And so I'll talk about today and then there's a business insight here as well. So I had the privilege of working on, an innovative product that was about the future of towing, because in that business, your ecosystem involves the thing that tows it. Right? It's it doesn't go anywhere by itself. And with the, electrification and the shift to different types of powertrains, there was a huge risk for the lifestyle because of freedom. And if you don't have the range in your truck, you can't get to the national parks. So this was the development, we partnered and developed a powertrain in a trailer. Simple explanation. If you get your truck driving normally, it pulls the trailer. Now there's actually motors and batteries and power. So the trailer follows behind the Toronto. So kind of the truck got 300 miles of range without a trailer. Now it gets about 300 miles of range with a trailer. Nice. Okay. So innovation, a test case, a prototype that actually worked and went on, you know, out on the road and trips. There was some update. This is something else I really love about this product. We did updating to some of the lighting and we made aerodynamic enhancements. So we gave feedback to the customers, to the lighting for things like charging. We improved the aerodynamics. We didn't change it, made an improvement to it and it was a standard shell off the line. So if you look at it, think of the aluminum shell. We literally took the standard shell right off the line. We put advanced technology where you don't see it. We improve the aerodynamics. So clean, you know, underbelly clean roof, some fancy things at the rear of the trailer. So it looks really cool, actually looks even more retro futuristic. Okay. But that's because it would perform better and get more range. So it was both, it ended up being a beautiful object and one that had some real functional innovation. And so it's over actually in the, in the museum now. And if you if you have a career and part of your careers at Airstream, that's it's pretty cool to know that you've. Yeah. You've created something with enough value that it's actually in a museum. Yeah. That's well, I mean, it's amazing you're in the museum, but also just the level of impact you can have on something like transformation to electrification. Yeah. So we, you know, we've done a lot of work in electrification. And why do people adopt it or not adopt it. And where sort of the, the curve, you know, where, where can we see mass adoption. And to me, right now, at least with passenger vehicles, electrification, it's just like, an ICE vehicle, internal combustion engine, but with baggage. You have to modify your house and you might run out of range and leave your family stranded and things like that. So but that can't be the value proposition. It's just like your old car, But worse. But worse. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the idea of can we add value? Yes. Can, you know, can we combine it with other technologies to either add value or can we radically simplify the ownership process? You've done both. Yeah. By thinking outside like okay, I can't impact, you know, the Super Duty truck, or the electrified truck, but I can boost it. I can give it more, you know? Well, that's an amazing idea and example of innovation. Yeah. That actually one- went one step further and has also opportunity at the Thor level. So across all of the family of companies because this is exactly where we started. We knew there's risk like where is EV headed. And that's come to pass infrastructure. There were a lot of factors outside of our control. So we were looking for unique benefits that weren't dependent on these other things. If it was a car manufacturer, you could say, well, you know, performance, all of the tork and instant, you know, tork about performance of that system. If it's an RV, you don't want that. Like literally if you have a motorhome that goes too fast, like you just the dishes are going to go flying out of the cabinet. You don't you don't want that. But, having power and now large amounts of power, you know, the amount of power that you can move a motorhome or a trailer around with is a huge amount of power to run your air conditioners and your lights and charge your e-bike, like, ten times the amount of power to do that. So now you've got we talked about freedom of resources. You've got this huge resource that you're basically taking with you for free. Yeah. So at the Thor level, we actually designed a system that could take an automotive high voltage big DC battery and turn it into the power of your house. Yeah. And really, no one was doing that because you in a car, you don't need to run those things. But so basically literally the wall socket, you can take the battery from the car. And now you've got like wall sockets to plug in blenders and everything else with, so that there was a unique benefit to an EV powertrain tech help give customers freedom to go off grid. And so we actually designed all the electronics interfaces to be able to do that. Those types of systems are actually coming to market now, not just in trailers, but on motor homes as well. Just, there's releases happening. You'll see next year, vehicles coming to market with that. But it was really it was the team and I, it's a team almost, really pressuring themselves to unlock new benefits because we knew how much was outside of our control. We focused what was inside of control, and we found some new opportunities and then undertook the electrical design work. Yeah, it, reminds me of, like, Ford's new power boost on their F-150, right? 7.2kW generator in the back. You know, and I've heard some stories about people who will run their recreational vehicles from the back of the truck. So it's similar- They were first- The similar kind of idea. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Just a much bigger battery than attached to it. Yeah. So yeah that definitely I've found you can unlock new benefits. Really with that type of focus on the customer and the experience. You mentioned the museum though I think another really- Yeah.-For me, it was a powerful business insight because the museum isn't just all of the success stories, but it tells, here's everything that Airstreams tried over the years. So you do get some really iconic, beautiful vehicles or talks about a caravan, you know, through Africa. But then there'll be things like there's a hearse, there's an Airstream hearse in the museum. Well, yeah. Like so envision like a 1970s aluminum motorhome. It's actually made motorhomes that look like an Airstream, but turned into a vehicle that was designed to take people, I love this business insight to take people from the funeral home out to the actual cemetery. Yeah. Because you think about what happens today, right? So everyone's together and the family is they should be together celebrating this person's life. They all break up and they go into different cars. And then you see that fleet and everyone's going separate and then arrive back together when the insight is, you know, that the family would like to stay together through that whole period of that whole process. So if you had a big vehicle, you could fit. I think it was 18 something. Yeah, 12, 14, 18 people in this vehicle. And then they can actually stay together through, you know, the kind of the entire celebration of the person. So they took a motorhome and they turned it into hearses, super cool, like lounge seating and such. And then in the back, there's actually a place where you open a door and you can slide the casket inside the vehicle. There's a big thing. You can put all the flower arrangements inside the vehicle and head out to the cemetery. So really interesting business insight. Airstream does not make hearses today. Right? Right. So what you get is this arc of here's the things of making improvements. These are things that last over time and they're still with us over almost 100 years versus these dead ends of hearses. They made it's called a fifth wheel. It's a really big trailer that kind of sits over the truck, made them out of fiberglass and look nothing like an Airstream. Completely different, you know, target customer. That's not with the company anymore. Yeah. So literally there's times I would just go walk the museum because you can start to see the detours. Someone's passionate. Oh, we need to go get into this market. It's going to be growth. It's incremental revenue for us. Is that going to end up in the museum or is this going to be one of these dead ends that, you know, goes for a couple of years, but it's not core to the DNA and the promise of the company, like literally having a museum on site helped you see what other people had tried before. Yeah. And try to hold the course for the brand, you know. Well, you've got your time in the chair. Interesting. So you see what kind of experiments that maybe didn't go well. On one hand, I suppose it's empowering to think that, you know, you have the freedom to explore that kind of innovation. And on the other hand, that maybe, like you say, it gives you insight into what what is long tail is that things are really more permanent. Yeah, with the brand. Exactly and congrats for Airstream for putting that in because usually those like in a business context, those aren't always the stories that are told. Right. So internally, a company, sometimes we don't want to talk about that one because it didn't go well. But those are the ones you should talk about. You need to learn from it. It seems like an amazing culture that you're working in, which is which is awesome. Yeah. You mentioned something a minute ago. The idea of designing from the experience backwards. Yeah. And when when I think about your story about, the EV, yes. Potentially, threat to the business if it can't get the Airstream, you know, you can't have your mobile lifestyle because you're limited by range and stuff and how you've addressed that, but also thinking more broadly about the power requirements and things like that. There's a it seems to me that embodies that a lot. Tell me what you mean when you say designing from the experience backwards. Yeah. And there's, there's maybe two completely different implementations that I found. Both work. We can start from a technology standpoint, and I am a believer that you can try something and experiment and technology can unlock new opportunities, but you can also start with the experience first in the market and then backwards and actually develop the right technology for that. So that's what we're talking about here. And in electrification, really the key challenge there was what we were discussing about range and what we aligned on is for a great experience. And of course we had 90 years of experience. We knew where people like to travel, where they wanted to go, that to have that or more freedom to camp off grid. We actually set the, a vision for the experience and identified KPIs. So this is the beginning of the design process. So we started with KPIs as an example. The drive to charge time ratio are those two things. How am I spending driving? How am I spending charging the vehicle. And if that gets out of whack, you're not you're not having fun. You're not being you're just spending too much time doing the thing, not enjoying the thing. And so we actually did, some benchmarking talk to customers and identified the experience that we wanted to have while they're on the road, turn that into a KPI and then went back and looked at what, what technology we were on and spending money actually developing that technology. And in that instance, that that experience that we envisioned and quantified for customers, we realized that some motorhome technology that was being worked on wasn't going to be able to deliver it. It got us out of the optimism for the future, kind of the blind faith that, you know, if you build it, they will come. But rather said this is the experience customers want to have. Can we develop it or how can we deliver it or not? And the good news is what happens. We realize that fairly early on, we were able to pivot. So as opposed to a pure EV motorhome, these things are really big. You drive long distances at high speed. It's a hard thing to do. We turned that same like lure, that same powertrain into a hybrid vehicle, so added a range extender to it so that you could deliver on the drive to charge time ratio. Customers have a great experience. They've got that same freedom of travel. So it wasn't starting with the technology we did. We had to experiment enough to know what we were dealing with. But then we quantified the customer experience. In that instance, we changed our product roadmap to deliver on it. Yeah, I love the idea of, experience metrics as KPIs. You know what I mean? That you've been able to define what the future needed to be experientially and work your way back to the technology. Yeah. So it's not a technology looking for a home or a way to add value. You know what the value is and how you can shape how you deliver it. It's to me, it's it's similar to an idea I call experience value management, which is like, how do you think about shaping experiences such that you're adding value to the customer and adding value to the business? And sometimes that means investing in a particular area of the journey, and sometimes it means not like maybe not investing in this area. There's not enough high value. Yeah. Or finding a different way to implement the experience in a way that's more cost effective to the organization. You know, easier manufacturing or whatever. So, it's a- I love that idea of, of the, designing the experience backwards. I remember, Craig Vogel had this idea of, he called it back casting is the idea of projecting people into a future and then back casting. Into your innovation so it reminds me of that a little bit. Yeah, it sounds very similar. The other place I've had success doing that is with interior design. So if you think about an RV, it literally is a house on wheels. So you're actually designing the interior and there's a portfolio. This is where things can start to diverge the outside of these vehicles, whether it's Airstream or other brands like Jayco and Keystone mentioned, they're fairly consistent. Yeah. But the interior, you find people are attracted to a lot of different looks, and so you can create a portfolio of products on that interior. And so we would actually find, you know, an inspiration photo, but really focus on the experience. And typically a lot of the RV industry is okay. It's a beautiful mountain right. You're out camping. That's the experience. But when you build out a portfolio, you can do things. We had vehicles that were really inspired by private jets. Or, we had collaborations with companies like, Pendleton Woolen Mill, which that's beautiful product. It really is here's the experience of the customer where, you know what, what's the backdrop, what location are the in? You know, who are the people, what is the environment around them, and then design the actual interior space to match to that customer. It's just a way as opposed to having a design brief, which is important. And, you know, writing all the words down with a couple of inspiration pictures. This is literally picturing creating a visual artifact of the person in the context with the vehicle. And somehow that was, a little bit richer, maybe, and helped the design team early in the design process. Yeah, I yeah, I love the idea of projecting people in the business into the, into the future. The guy, from the Doblin group, I don't know if you remember there in Chicago when you used to talk about business concept illustration, it was a similar idea. Yeah. You you represent the future in a way that you can describe the customer benefits and the business benefit before investing heavily in anything. Now, tell me, are these when you think about portfolio, is it coupled to the brand and what you want the brand to stand for, like Jayco versus Keystone versus Airstream? Do you have core values that each one's trying to stand for? And is that how you're manifesting some of this portfolio like this one's going to be premium or luxury and this one's going to be performance and efficiency. Or is is that part of what's driving the rationale? Yeah. Someone to it maybe two levels on that as well. There's both within a brand in that portfolio, but also as Thor Industries, which effectively is a conglomerate, lots of independent businesses. And it's really fascinating. They take a very different approach. So kind of as you described it, I think of as something that you see a lot of companies trying to find those balances of, you know, how to differentiate and segment markets with brands, keep those lanes clear and distinct. It's kind of an ongoing challenge. The beauty of Thor's, they don't do that at all. And it's shocking to see they have a little bit don't do this. And they do not do that at all. So it's it starts off much more like, almost a financial holding company of buying companies. And then just helping them be successful, you know, supporting them financially, supporting their growth with capital and investment and just letting them duke it out in the marketplace. Companies evolved a bit over time, finding those areas, but it never gets to the customer. So find the, you know, synergy. But trying to do that in ways that don't ever touch the customer and the customer experience or really sometimes even the dealer channel. And so they've at the four level for Thor Industries, which has been around over 40 years, they've kept that spirit alive. I think to me, that's the spirit of competition and allowing competition between each of the companies, because each of those business units, you know, the president of that business unit is highly motivated to win for his brand. And so the portfolio basically, it organically grows and shifts. It's almost like the market is defining the portfolio instead of a top down. I know, you know, I know the best. So I'm going to tell each of these companies what to do. Yeah I'd say, my immediate thought goes to, aren't you cannibalizing each other in the market potentially? Yes. Yeah. And so the answer that's probably yes. But on the flip side, you get this like entrepreneur or startup mentality where you're freedom and, you're much faster to innovate. Yeah. It's exactly it. It's exactly it. And on the balance of those two things, because you're giving up a huge amount of opportunity, cost savings, you know, leverage and all those typical things you think of because you get this entrepreneurial, driven mindset. And so the easy thing is just look at the financial performance of the company. Yeah. Over the past 40 years. And it's been spectacular. It balances out heavily in, you know, business ownership and rewards for your own work outweigh the, the synergies. Interesting. Yeah. And these brands probably live or die a little bit. Right. Like if they can't figure out how to compete in the market, then they just are we go away. Yes. Yeah. It's interesting like, some of the companies that we worked at, like Le Grand has really grown through acquisition and it creates interesting challenges from a culture standpoint. And like you say, processes are different. Go to market, strategies are different. But you get, an overall lift in market share and you get the ability to learn from each other. Yeah, but you still run like an entrepreneur, like a startup, even innovate, innovate fast. It also reminds me of my days at Hewlett Packard. That was that was Hewlett Packards mentality, which is we run as independent units so you can innovate, and go fast. And so it's an interesting approach as opposed to like like you say, trying to create some structured set of core values and design language that each brand has to represent and maintain that. Yeah. I can see that too. But, you know, it's interesting that, you know, as a business, you have to pick a lane and decide what you're going to do. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I'm I'm excited about one of the challenges there is because you're not integrating. You've got data in all these different companies and everything's done differently. AI is really a powerful tool to create some synergies without having to standardize. Right. That's that's the can be the standardization. Commonality can be the death of the you know, what we've been talking about that spirit. So I think it's actually that business model, one person's opinion is actually going to, be even more powerful going forward because you don't have to make everyone use the same ERP systems or follow the exact same design processes. And so some of the tools that we have now to connect these disparate dots. Yeah, because AI will do the translation for you is that what your-? Yeah. And you know data is easiest example of you can take data sets that were not designed. They had literally completely different data sets. And it can find the commonality. It could be as simple as a customer, you know, customer contact list. Yeah. And if you got six of them and they're all formatted differently and call things different things typically that would be a nightmare. You know, IT’s head would explode and you wouldn't get the synergy out of that. Right. But if you can easily bring those things together, you can find those synergies now. So yeah, the business model I think is going to be healthy going forward. Awesome. McKay This has been an amazing time. You and I could go forever on this. I, I really, appreciate our discussion today and the insight that you've given us. Thanks for the time. Tell us a little bit about, what's next week? Well, first, let me ask this question. Yeah. If you had advice for a business leader about how to improve their ability to innovate and succeed and be more customer centric, what kind of advice would you give a business leader? Yeah. That's a great question. I do also want to make sure I think we've talked about design research and some of the things that, you know, you do very well here, and those have powered a lot of the, you know, the stories that that I shared. In terms of innovation, what would I say? It's a very culturally specific answer. So just start there. What's the appetite for risk within the organization is really going to define how you approach this. But you can always start somewhere so that that's the baseline. Even if it's a risk averse organization. That's okay. There's always a place to start and try. So starting small is fine. You test, you learn. So I would encourage if even if this isn't someone that individually is passionate about it, maybe not the overall organization results matter from a business standpoint. So find some low cost ways. We just talked about AI. Things are getting much cheaper and easier to go do and try. AI is not great at scaling things you know and making them perfectly secure, but it's really easy to test and try something. So I'd say, get started, try something, find the cheap and easy test with that. Overall, understand the culture specifically from a risk standpoint, because a lot of people hear innovation. And if you need the CFO to sign off to scale a project, they're going to be thinking about risk. I personally look at it as calculated risk. And that's where though you need to know how do I translate the calculated risk over to the organization? Yeah. But with those two things, some early results that you've tried with and the ability to translate it is a calculated risk. It's a great place to start to get funding to go further Yeah, I love that. So be business sensitive to how the organization's going to, perceive risk, culturally sensitive and then, like you say, you have lots of avenues to test and learn. There's an easy way to put stuff out there and see what you're getting. We talked about working from the experience backwards, which is kind of like a projection technique. How do I project people into potential futures and evaluate those? How do I look at it from a technology availability standpoint? So we've discussed a lot of ways that you can sort of begin to think about innovation. Yeah, maybe one other things I've learned, over the course of my career, translating that, you know, design world business is the marketing team. Yeah. That can be a difficult thing to do to get those meshed, but one thing that I found is really kind of the universal language or translator between this is assessing how much does the organization know about a topic. So let me expand here a little bit. If you're looking at a new market, you know, a new segment, a new target customer channel, whatever happens to be there's always that you need maybe supply chain involved operations, cross-functional, opportunity. Everyone can easily translate. How much do we know about these areas? So when I've been looking at early stage, what are the best priorities to go after? Literally dead simple. It's how much do we know about this customer? You know what this is? This is our customer. We're just trying to sell them something new. But we know the customer or maybe not. How much do I know about the channel? This is going to be sold through the same retail or through the same e-com. Hey, we've got a great relationship with Amazon. That part's going to be easy. There's not risk there. So you're quantifying things. Yeah. Going through you know is the brand promise the same. This fits under umbrella all the way through. Do we know how to make this thing? Is it is it a new piece of technology and we literally don't have the equipment to be able to do this in-house? And I mean, you can ten minutes, 15 minutes pretty quickly go through and is opposed to this big risky thing. It's unknown. It's untried. Get it right down to, you know what this idea it's this is going to require operations input because this is a change for them or this idea fits perfectly in with what you know, the marketing team is doing. They might actually be a proponent for this idea and come alongside us to help out, helping just map those things out in a really simple format. Both has helped to assess the actual risk, but also start to see the world outside of design from other people's perspectives. And then you can gauge, right, how do I kind of, you know, bring this idea through to through to the market? Yeah, I love that. So, we were just talking to the leadership team this morning about, you know, insight translation. How do you go from insight to strategy? And I love the idea of developing these kind of criteria about what do we know about this to identify in way opportunity spaces, value propositions and then, you know, the more that I think we're in this customer experience business, we're really, I think in the alignment business, how do you align an organization all with different backgrounds and different responsibilities around what the future should look like, what problem we're solving, what the opportunity looks like and getting them all aligned to that. So clearly this has been part of your, your secret to success too. So that's it's very insightful. Yeah. People want to take good care of their customers. But there's a lot that a lot of them don't really know how to do that in translating align that that's the magic. Yeah we all have a lot of customers, right. And they're not necessarily just outside in the market. We have customers internally have stakeholders. We have to understand and make sure we onboard, you know, because people can fear change. People want to leave their mark in a unique way. But how do you give them a shared sense of what success looks like? Yeah. McKay it's awesome man. I've really enjoyed this time. How can people get ahold of you, if they want to reach out and learn more? Yeah, easiest thing I would say is LinkedIn. So it's McKay Featherstone, M C K A Y and then feather and Stone. There's not a lot of McKay Featherstone's around, so that makes it pretty easily. I haven't checked recently, but I'm pretty sure you type that in, I should show up, on the first page or so. And there's some contact information there, so. Yeah. Okay. That sounds good. I’d love to connect. Yeah. Thanks again for the time today. And I hope you come back as your, you know, career progresses and, share more about your insights and, and how we can all get better at you know, moving an organization and delivering, like you say, the mission. You know, getting up in the morning and adding value and changing people's lives so McKay, thanks so much for that. Thank you. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today on Seriously Curious, a podcast, all things UX for business Strategy and Design. Stay tuned for more, coming up, in Seriously Curious episodes, we're going to take on the future of air mobility. We're going to take on the future and see what's happening in retail, so those episodes will be coming up soon. Look for our announcements on LinkedIn. Visit lexant.com for more information on, human centric design and Seriously Curious. Thanks.