On The Edge with Bozeman’s Strategix ID

In an old brick building by the railroad tracks in north Bozeman, cutting-edge technology is born.

By Alison Pride Bozeman Chronicle

Welcome to the home base of Strategix ID, http://www.strategixid.com an industrial design firm with a low local profile and a client list that spans the country and ranges from Intel to Johnson & Johnson to Mercedes Benz.

Started in 1994 by the husband and wife team of Bill and Bobbi Clem, the company is unique both for its non-urban location and the variety of products it designs.

Inside its high-tech world, 13 employees combine their divergent skills to design everything from stationary bicycles to portable defibrilators to snowmobiles, to mention a few.

"If you design a product that has plastic or metal parts and it’s got a cool technology, that would be the kind of company we would work for," said Bobbi Clem, president. "What we are is a balance of research, engineering and design. We think it’s important it’s all integrated together.

"I think the reason we can jump back and forth in so many categories is we assume we are not the expert in anything," she said. "The one who is always the expert is the customer who ultimately uses the product."

"Everybody tells you they design for the customer, but I think what the issue is, they design for the supposed customer. They don’t go out and actually talk to anybody," said Bill Clem, founder and CEO of Strategix.

Typically, after being approached by a client, the firm will spend an extensive amount of time conducting research to identify what the client’s needs are, a process much more involved than just asking a few questions.

"We try to start out every project getting into the mindset of the customer, because they have found that people will say what they think you want to hear, or they don’t know how to verbalize what they really want," said Bobbi Clem.

In addition to employees with industrial design backgrounds, the firm’s somewhat eclectic group includes employees with backgrounds in psychology, cultural anthropology, philosophy and computers.

Their varied backgrounds make it possible to conduct the kind of research into people’s needs and wants that ultimately produces not only visually pleasing products but useful ones, as well.

"We typically start out and we’ll ask somebody a question over the telephone, and ask them to bring in items, artifacts, photographs, whatever, that remind them of the thing we’re asking them about," says Bill Clem.

"We’re asking for metaphors, archetypes, stories, and then we’ll interview them and talk to them and we’ll watch them, videotape them and at the end we’ll run the videotape back and go over it with them," he said. "It’s amazing how many people look at that and say, ‘I never knew I did that.’"

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Strategix ID

802 North Wallace

Bozeman, Montana 59715

tel: 406.585.7909

toll-free: 877-873-4044

fax: 406.587.8337

[email protected]

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As an illustration, he tells the story of one elderly woman they asked to make a pie. When she described her process to them, she said she had a stool she used at the beginning to gather her ingredients, but maintained she then put the stool away.

The videotape showed something different.

"It turned out she used her stool over a dozen times to get various things, but she never remembered it," said Bill Clem. "The important thing to her were these other things, but the use of the stool had become so intrinsically buried in her day-to-day usage that it was a big part of it. What happened is that we designed a better stool."

"So you may actually look at another product and think you need an apple peeler, but what you need is a better stool," he said.

Emotions often dictate decisions in the business world, contrary to what people might believe.

"The fact is, a lot of things are a lot more emotional than people think they are," said Bill Clem. "Everything is emotional. We use emotions to be rational. There are test companies that make laser test equipment and they basically say, ‘I sell to engineers and they just want something that’s simple and easy and direct.’ And simple and easy and direct are all emotional things."

It’s an emotional connection to a product that gives it relevance and staying power in a culture flooded with the latest thing.

"Technologies that are not relevant, because they have no emotional ties, die," he said.

More often than not, Strategix http://www.strategixid.com employees will travel to the potential customer to conduct research before returning home to Bozeman to work out a design, a process that involves several cycles of brainstorming, conceptualizing and building models, sometimes all in the course of a single day.

Besides the main office, the company also has a shop in north Bozeman that houses a three-axis mill, or "monster prototyper," a machine capable of building, from computer coordinates, a full-size, photo-realistic prototype out of high-density foam. They’ve built, among other things, a snowmobile, watercraft, golf cart and race car.

The company has received numerous awards over the years for their original designs, including a gold award from the Industrial Designers Society of America for its TR5 exercise bicycle, and a silver award for the Persist, a hand-held unit designed to help people suffering from urinary incontinence, an often emotional issue affecting predominately older women.

The Persist also won a platinum award, the top award in the United States, from the American Society for Aging.

Over the years, the company has branched out to design more and more in the field of medical supplies, which Bobbi Clem finds very satisfying.

"We get to design products that change the world. We get to design products that really impact people’s lives. We get to do work that matters. I think we’re all really jazzed by that," she said.

Both the Clems are native Montanans. Their fathers used to work together.

They met in an accounting class at Montana State University, an occurrence that makes Bobbi Clem shake her head and laugh, since she said accounting isn’t Bill’s strong suit.

When Bill Clem graduated with a bachelor’s degree in arts and industrial design (a degree MSU no longer offers), the couple moved to Minnesota, where he worked as a designer for Polaris. He continues to consult for the company today.

From there, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where Bill worked for BMW and Bobbi finished her degree at UCLA. Her educational background includes accounting, interior architecture and facilities management, giving her a blend of skills that serve her well in her capacity as president of Strategix, where she watches over an interesting and sometimes challenging group of diverse thinkers.

From Los Angeles the family headed north to Seattle, where Bill worked for Intermec, a bar code manufacturer, and Tunturi, a Finnish fitness equipment company. Along the way, the couple had two sons.

In 1994, the Clems decided to branch out on their own and chose Bozeman as home base to be near their aging parents and give their kids a chance to know their grandparents.

The original plan was for Bill to work out of a big garage they had built on their property, but the company quickly outgrew the space.

"It just made more sense to hire other talent and work with it that way," he said.

In fact, according to Bobbi Clem, their growth was so rapid — 200 percent a year for the first five years –they quickly outgrew their space, and she came on board to run the business end of the company.

Contrary to their small-town location being a detriment (most comparably sized firms in the country are located in large urban areas), the couple have found that the Bozeman office often attracts clients.

For a while the couple kept an office in Seattle, theorizing that they needed a presence in a large urban area, but the expense became unnecessary.

"We had actually reached a momentum and we found that even the clients we had in the Seattle area wanted to come to Bozeman … because the expertise of the staff here in Bozeman was so superior," said Bobbi Clem.

"We had a client recently that promised us the project on the condition he be able to stay over the weekend and go snowboarding," she said with laugh.

So far, the company has only had one local client, Wavelength Electronics. But Bobbi Clem said that, too, may be changing soon. Strategix is currently discussing potential projects with three local clients.

For Wavelength, Strategix changed the look of the packaging for one of their heatsinks, adding curves for a more high-tech look when everyone else was sticking with a standard, square design.

"Strategix offered us world-class packaging and design," said Mary Knighton, co-owner and CEO of Wavelength. "Because of that, we’re competing with the big boys."

Strategix also helped with the manufacturing end and helped Wavelength redesign their logo.

"It’s a firm of the caliber you’d find in New York or L.A. or some of the bigger cities," Knighton said. "They were really a team."

For now, the future of Strategix seems bright, despite the ailing economy.

Bobbi Clem said they’ve found the right group of people (although the company is actively looking for a female industrial designer), which she described as "a bunch of very strongly right-brained and left-brained people working together."

"They are just awesome," she said. "I would pit them against any firm in the U.S. in terms of their abilities to creatively solve problems."

And the high-tech industry is beginning to show some early signs of recovery, even in Montana.

"We think high-tech is the way Bozeman needs to grow," said Bobbi Clem. "We truly believe this is the kind of industry we want to encourage. That’s part of the reason we’re back here, too."

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2003/05/27/business/01strategix.txt