Today’s guest entry is written by Patricia Nyberg, who is working with the startup moveART along with her team (from the left in the below photo): Carel Hoffman (South African), Patricia Nyberg, (Finnish), Viktor Bisovetskyi (Ukrainian), Louis Lozouet (Brazilian/French), Zehra Ali (American), and Baiyu Li (Chinese).
It’s Sunday morning. The alarm goes off. The sun is still not up and I wonder why I have to wake up so early. But once I remember that we’re going to Zürich to support our startup moveART at the Giardina garden expo, I immediately jump out of bed!
As has been explained in some previous blog posts, the MBA class was divided into 15 groups at the beginning of the programme and each group was assigned a start-up to work with until April as part of the entrepreneurship stream. Our group had the pleasure to be connected with moveART, a start-up that creates functional and sustainable sculptures for playgrounds and public spaces (moveonart.ch). The creator, entrepreneur and heart of the start-up is Norbert Roztocki, originally from Poland, currently living in Basel, Switzerland with his wife and two children.
The idea came about when his son was playing on a sculpture that he had made and he realized how excited and creative his son was, climbing on the sculpture that seemed to have no clear purpose. The products of moveART all stem from the same shape – the DNA structure. They offer a sustainable and ecological way to enliven, integrate, inspire and create a harmony between human beings and their surroundings by combining the key principles of art, functionality and safety. The key component of the sculptures is the wood they are made of. Accoya, as the wood is called, is the result of decades of research and development that has brought together a long-established, extensively proven wood modification technique and leading-edge patented technology – acetylation to create high-performance wood, ideal for outdoor use and challenging applications.
Since its foundation in 2015, moveART has won third place in the Swiss upstart challenge and fifth place in the Swiss innovation challenge. During our collaboration, we helped moveART apply for the Danish Design Awards and to our joy it got shortlisted as a potential finalist. We’re therefore eagerly awaiting the final results on the 24th of March.
Getting back to the exhibition in Zürich, Giardina is one of Europe’s leading indoor garden events. Each year, at the start of spring, the leading suppliers in the sector present new products, creative solutions and upcoming trends in garden design on an area of some 30,000 square meters. The objective with our visit was to conduct a customer survey and support moveART in promoting its products. This was a perfect opportunity for us to see how customers react to the products and understand their thoughts better. What made the journey even more exciting was the fact that moveART had won the Silver Giardina Award the previous day. The award is given to exhibitors that stand out and convince onlookers through the quality of their workmanship and the overall impression they make. This was good news for our customer survey as it further increased the number of visitors passing the stand.
The results of the survey confirmed our assumption that moveART products are indeed very fascinating for consumers and from what we could observe – kids really love them too! The challenge that remains is to channel this information to industry professionals like landscape architects and distributors who essentially suggest which products should be used in building public spaces and playgrounds. This is where our focus has been during the past two months and we look forward to present our findings and thoughts to the start-up in April!
moveART founder Norbert Roztocki, in the middle:
