Bandicoot Imaging hits the global market with a little help from SME@UTS
For Australian FashTech company Bandicoot Imaging, the road to market is paved with expert business advice from SME@UTS and the UTS Executive MBA Strategic Design Studio.
Affordable and high-quality strategic business advice can be hard to come by. Small teams often need to outsource to access this critical expertise, and tight budgets can limit their access to the skillsets they need. Bandicoot Imaging came face-to-face with this challenge as they looked to expand into new markets.
A fabric digitisation company, Bandicoot is playing a key role in accelerating digital innovation in the global fashion industry. When it came time to take their novel fabric scanning technology to new markets, they turned to SME@UTS, a concierge style service that connects business leaders to a plethora of growth opportunities across an ecosystem of university and industry partners. After assessing Bandicoot’s business needs, the SME@UTS team offered to fund their participation in the highly acclaimed Strategic Design Studio at UTS — and a new path to market began to appear.
“We create a complete digital twin of a physical fabric for use in digital design and merchandising. We’ve been in development for three years, we’ve created our own technology from scratch, but what we really needed was to show that we had a product people wanted to use.” says CEO David Monaghan.
Powerful innovation via the UTS Strategic Design Studio
The Strategic Design Studio is powered by the expertise of Executive MBA (EMBA) students in the UTS Business School. It operates like an innovation strategy consultancy: participating organisations provide a project brief and students deliver innovative solutions with realistic and achievable implementation plans to help businesses achieve their goals. For students, the Strategic Design Studio provides a real-world work-integrated learning experience. Businesses retain all intellectual property generated during the program.
“SME@UTS, in partnership with the Executive MBA Strategic Design Studio, lowers the barrier to access high-quality, strategic business advice that can guide SMEs towards more rapid and profitable decision making. Our students deliver evidence-based solutions that mirror the outcomes you’d expect from a professional consultancy at a fraction of the cost and with no strings attached.” says Associate Professor Jochen Schweitzer, Faculty Lead for the Strategic Design Studio and course director of the Executive MBA
Remarkable new opportunities revealed
The Bandicoot team was matched with EMBA students led by Priya Krishnamurthy and supported by executive business coach Zeljko Nikolic. The students started exploring the digital fashion industry, drawing on their design thinking, data analysis and small business expertise to assess Bandicoot’s opportunities and challenges. Their brief had a strong focus on denim as the company’s target market. Monaghan and his team had done some preliminary research, but they were unsure about whether denim was the right fit.
“We needed to understand the markets we were looking to enter and how to sell to those markets,” Monaghan says.
The research revealed good and bad news: the denim market wasn’t ready for digital transformation, and denim itself wasn’t properly aligned with Bandicoot’s current technology offering. However, the students identified another market with extensive potential for Bandicoot to consider: the Indian sari market. Immediately, the Bandicoot team could see the remarkable synergy with their scanning technology and service offerings. In consultation with the students, the Bandicoot team revised the brief to focus on developing product-market fit and a scalable offering within the sari market that would enable recurring revenue within the next two years.
“It’s a growing market and because of the sheer vibrancy and textures of those materials, it’s very well suited to being displayed with Bandicoot’s technology online,” Monaghan says.
Accelerating future success
At the end of the project, the students presented the Bandicoot team with a usability study, a go-to-market strategy, a viability strategy and an agile commercialisation workplan. Combined, these outputs provide a step-by-step approach to guide the company’s activities in the sari market between now and 2025. The Bandicoot team is now in discussions with prospective partners in India to bring the strategy to life.
“The whole collaborative experience and results exceeded my expectations. The students not only went out and gathered an enormous amount of raw data, but they processed that raw data, drew conclusions from that raw data and applied a critical thinking lens to make recommendations and create new knowledge.” says Monaghan.