Founded on a Passion for People and Product

As we celebrate 15 years of consumer feedback innovation and community building, we’re taking a moment to look back at our origins and the principles that continue to guide us today. For over a decade, MESH01 has put its words into action, listening intently to its own customers as we recommend brands do with theirs by connecting people and product. Now, these conversations are approaching two decades, and the guidance they’ve generated has shaped our offerings integrally. In this post, we’ll revisit MESH01’s beginnings in crowdsourced product design and some early twists and turns.

The Digital Age, Crowdsourcing and Co-Creation: MESH01’s Origin Story

Whether you’re a MESH01 feedback community member or a seasoned brand user, you may not know that our origin story doesn’t begin with product testing. In fact, MESH01 was founded with a passion for people and product by Brian Bednarek in 2010 as a crowdsourced product design solution, just a few years after Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing.

In 2009, the year Kickstarter began, ushering in an era of community-supported product innovation, the primordial existence of MESH01 was already deep in conversation with the world’s most recognized brands as they explored how the crowdsourcing model could enhance their product creation processes. From accelerated speed to market to untapped opportunity for product innovation, the early 2000’s saw brands motivated to harness the potential of a global talent pool.

Right around the time of MESH01’s inception, brands like Nike explored co-creation with NikeID while others like Reebok experimented with open innovation challenges respectively, validating the title “Co-Creation Isn’t Just a Trend” in a flurry of brand-and-customer collaboration.

Within many of those brands’ walls, MESH01’s founder listened to the changing needs and challenges that came along with product creation, experience and feedback as the internet continued to boom.

The result was a direct response; the launch of MESH01 as a co-creation platform connecting brands to designers across the world. And by the end of 2011, MESH01’s community grew to over 3,000 product designers who participated in product design competitions for a growing list of brands. But this trajectory was about to change.

MESH01 Enables Crowdsourced Consumer Feedback

Not long after the launch of MESH01’s crowdsourced product design platform, the customer conversations began to change. While brands’ interests in crowdsourced product design would continue, many began wondering if product feedback -more specific and actionable product feedback than they were getting- could be sourced using the same model.

In 2011, MESH01 was already operating within an agile methodology, using scrum frameworks and with a high level of flexibility in order to respond to our customers’ rapidly evolving needs. This approach allowed MESH01 to quickly adapt the platform previously developed to facilitate product design competitions and designer-to-brand communication for brands like Reebok and Under Armour to now channel feedback on product designs through a community of real people.

Read more on Footwear News: MESH01 Launches Wear Testing Platform

With its earliest version of purpose-built feedback technology in place, MESH01 combined its designer community with a new community of only 1,000 customers-as-testers, setting the course of what MESH01 is today.

MESH01 Finds Validation in Connecting People and Product

Parallel to the pre-market product validation brands were starting to generate on the new MESH01 platform, MESH01 itself saw similar validation. Chris Adam, Timberland’s then Senior Manager of Technology Research and Development explains “we’ve seen the benefits of access to a large Web-based community of wear testers, and we’ve gained efficiencies in data collection and analysis.”

“We initially ran two trials to understand how the site worked and to gain an understanding of the benefits. Based on the success of those trials, we have initiated a larger-scale wear test to look at the performance of several materials updates on one of Timberland’s core products” Adam continued.

These experiences spread, brand by brand, marking the early adoption period of MESH01’s core offerings.

A Double-Edged Sword: Big Early Adopters Push MESH01 to its Potential

Within the first few years of MESH01’s introduction of crowdsourced wear testing, we saw an influx of customers that included the world’s biggest and most recognized footwear and apparel brands and retailers. It was to this MESH01’s early advisors offered “congratulations, and condolences”, speaking to the challenges that can come with solving complex problems for large organizations.

But as MESH01 navigated the challenges of connecting people and product in deep collaboration with our customers, we were becoming a better partner by being pushed to solve for these complex needs. This formative period saw rapid development of platform features and enhancements designed to fit the product creation process, channel consumer feedback to the right audience at the right time and even help manage associated workload.

The development during this period also illustrated the level of need from our customers who were urgently ready to deploy new MESH01 tech. These integrations included an array of integrations including early AI applications and body scanning as well as PTC’s FlexPLM.

A result, in addition to a growing number of brands and product testers was also some early recognition, including being named one of 10 companies recognized as a top startup in data, insights and personalization in Unilever’s Foundry 50 in 2016.

A result, in addition to a growing number of brands and product testers was also some early recognition, including being named one of 10 companies recognized as a top startup in data, insights and personalization in Unilever’s Foundry 50 in 2016.

Weaving Together People and Product: MESH01’s Core

While MESH01’s origin story is undoubtedly tech-centric, it’s a story of passion, people and product at its core. We were founded with a deep appreciation and interest in the human experience, with an unrelenting interest in connection and partnership.

The early days of MESH01 were ones of collaboration between us, brands and customers. And thanks to this collaborative, multi-year product creation process, we’ve become a vaporless conduit for honest, reliable and actionable insights.

Join us next as we catch up to the present and look closer at our story today.