The art of owning the entire value chain
When Maren started at reMarkable in 2017, it was still a small company. Even then, the plan was to create something unique.
“Even before I started, reMarkable had decided to build as much as possible on its own. This entailed building everything from a support system to a sales organisation, as well as a global supply chain. This was done in order to design our services the way we wanted. In this way, we could create a holistic experience and customer journey.”
When a company owns the entire value chain, and therefore the entire customer journey, it is easier to adapt the experiences to the insight and data you have acquired. For reMarkable, this has been a steep learning curve, which has resulted in a better understanding of our customers’ needs.
“Direct-to-Consumer brands (D2C) are often characterised by a limited product portfolio, where they own most of their value chain. That is what we have done. We started digitally but have constantly been searching for other areas to move into. This has been a good learning experience, and it means that we can apply our better thinking to everything from packaging, experiences in the physical store, design of our own cloud services, and tablet user experiences.”
A holistic experience
Maren states that her primary focus as a service designer is to create a holistic brand experience that helps the customer to experience what we promise – better thinking.
“What is great about reMarkable is the high professional quality, with a broad range of domain knowledge and expertise in different areas. . The service designer’s role is partly to represent the customer’s perspective, and to see how the entirety is viewed from the outside. There has been a strong focus on creating a seamless customer journey the entire way – and even as a small start-up, we organised the company based on the customer journey.”
Team Ingebrigtsen
At reMarkable, we have high ambitions, and I believe that our employees enjoy tackling challenges.
“In an interview with A-magasinet, Magnus Wanberg, CEO and founder of reMarkable referred to what we are doing as an ‘elite sport’.” We aim to become true challengers for many of the major companies – Apple and Amazon. There was nothing to indicate that we would manage this, but if we keep delivering high quality in everything we do, and are strict about our priorities, then nothing is impossible.”
Maren believes that this may be somewhat unconventional for many Norwegian companies, but it is a little like an elite sport – when you want to achieve unusually good results, you have to do things in an unconventional way.
“… As the Ingebrigtsen brothers have shown. We have to work smarter to achieve what is nearly impossible.”
Small steps – big results
Maren represents service design as a discipline, and what is unique about reMarkable is that we own the entire customer journey. All our branches are in Norway, and everyone is based in Øvre Grünerløkka in Oslo (when we’re not working from home).
“This is different from other places I have worked, where it was difficult to make changes in the customer journey. That is so much easier here – since everything happens in one place. Small steps can therefore lead to big results.”
