If someone sneezes the aviation industry collapses. If the oil prices go up we are in deep trouble. Yet we continue to invest in design because we know we’ll see a return on our investment, and there’s nothing stopping any company from doing that. Joe Ferry, Virgin Atlantic Airways
Virgin Atlantic Airways Head of Design and Design Council member Joe Ferry outlines how investment in design has led to innovative products and services that encourage more people to fly Virgin.
Read the transcript below.
Joe Ferry, Head of Design, Virgin Atlantic Airways
Okay, I’m Joe Ferry, Head of Design. I’m terrified now. I’ve just seen the future of business class. Christ...
To give you some background if you don’t know about Virgin Atlantic: We’re going to be 26 this year, we had our 25th birthday last year. We fly over 28 routes which covers five continents, employ around 7,500 staff and have five million passengers experiencing our product each year. Despite those big numbers, in the grand scheme of things we’re quite small. We’ve almost got 40 aircraft. All of them are big, four engines, and fly long haul, but in comparison to someone like British Airways or American Airlines, we’re tiny and that’s why we’re pretty worried about an alliance there. It’s not very good for the consumers.
Anyway, like Apple has Steve Jobs, we have Steve Ridgeway, our CEO. He was quoted last year – I think it was in the Sunday Times – as saying that Virgin Atlantic doesn’t have the right to exist. Great. It exists because it’s been successful by being different, and I suppose that’s where I come into it, really, because we exist by having product and service differentiation. Essentially, if we’re competing with an airline on a route, they’re probably flying the same aircraft as us, they’re flying to the same destination and price is very competitive. So the thing that separates us – because we don’t have a massive route network – is our product and service, and design is a big element of that.
Now, it’s all very well talking about investing in design, but if you’ve experienced a year like we did last year where the whole industry – according to IATA – is about to lose $11 billion from one financial year, then it can be quite an unpleasant place to be the person that spends money. However, I’m very fortunate that design is at the heart of pretty much everything we do at Virgin Atlantic. I have to come up with the goodies that our PR department publicise, our marketing department sell, and ultimately attracts our passengers for our sales to go up. I can’t do that just by throwing money at it or taking seats off. I’ve got some commercial constraints, some financial constraints and, of course, the people inside the company, add their own constraints too.
However, we are very successful at delivering new innovations at very hard times. This is a planned view of a section of a 747 which illustrates an innovation we came up with which we thought was brilliant at the time, in June 2001. Obviously September 2001 turned the whole aviation industry on its head. However, I don’t know how many out there have asked last year for £40 million worth of R&D investment in a brand new product and had it approved. But in April 2002, when the business market was completely dead, that’s exactly what was approved for us to deliver the Upper Class Suite, which has been a great success for us. We achieved this holy grail of the passengers sleeping on different surfaces to the ones they were sitting on and we’ve managed to protect our intellectual property on that product. I’ll talk about that a bit later on.
As a designer I should be talking fluffy things and how wonderful things look. Actually, a lot of my concentration is on making money and I’m very pleased to report that as soon as we reached critical mass with the Upper Class Suite we achieved a profit that was as good as our best year in 1999. Obviously, sometimes we create designs because we’ve come up with a great idea, other times we have to do it as a competitor response. When the British Airport Authority gave our main competitor a brand new terminal we had to do something about it. We thought, how can we compete against such a big object? And there was the answer. You basically had to walk to Berkshire and eat a couple of bars of Kendal Mint Cake before you could actually get onboard your flight. So we thought we’d compete on speed, and that’s what we did. We created what we called the Upper Class Wing, which basically means when you’re chauffeur-driven in your business class car, by the time you’ve actually got to the top of the ramp at the Upper Class Wing we’ve already checked you in. So when you get out the car, we say, 'Hello, sir, here's your ticket. You’re in Seat 1A.' Your bags are taken away and you walk down a private security corridor. We believe that you can get from the limo to the lounge in around ten minutes. Obviously, business class customers are very competitive. The record is two and a half. It gets a bit messy after that.
And then what kind of a lounge would we deliver? Well, people have been talking about consumer research. We asked our passengers what they wanted. They said, 'I want to have a cup of tea, I’ll need a pee before the flight, and I want somewhere else to sit.' So we created a business class lounge looking like this, complete with sauna, jacuzzi, spray-tan booth so you can get tanned before you actually arrive. You can get your hair cut. In fact, I know a few passengers, this is their local hairdresser because they fly so frequently. And it’s got lots of other goodies like our Sky Bar. So, we don’t ignore our passengers but we believe that they don’t know what they could have so we try and deliver it. It’s not just about architecture and design, it’s about service design. We wanted to create an experience that was synonymous with a five-star private members’ club so we worked with Soho House on the service.
It’s very important for us to remember that while we’re investing in design for our passengers, we’ve also got other customers. Here is the greatest plane spotter window at Heathrow and it’s for our cabin crew, for their check-in experience. So we’re investing in our cabin crew, we’re also investing in our staff internally. Here is our main headquarters at Gatwick. We believe that investment in design is never wasted. It’s a bit like Formula One where you invest a lot of money upfront. Okay, sometimes the car spins off, but you’ve got that knowledge that you can disseminate into other products. In fact, our in-house team and the design consultancy that worked on the Upper Class Suite, have also done the premium economy and economy seats for us. And again, design isn’t just about making things look good – although we do do that – it’s about saving money.
This is an image of our premium economy seat that we took a value engineering look at, saved weight, saved components, saved cost, won a Design Effectiveness award last year, and ultimately made a seat in premium economy that was as wide and as comfortable as a business class seat. And again, I don’t just look at seats onboard, I look at the whole experience. I have architects, product designers, graphic designers, event designers all under one umbrella, all working together to create a fantastic experience, and we’ve had great results from this.
The Design Week Creative Survey of this year put us number one for interiors and exhibitions, number two for in-house design and number two in product design – both of those categories are led by Apple. I have a team of 22 people. So, for companies that say, 'It’s all right for you, Virgin, you’ve got all this money and you’ve got this fantastic President, Sir Richard Branson, it’s easy.' Actually, it’s very difficult. If someone sneezes the market collapses in the aviation industry. If the oil prices go up we are in deep trouble. If the exchange rates change we’re in deep trouble again. Yet, through all of that we continue to invest in design because we know we’ll see a return on our investment, and there’s nothing stopping any company from doing that.
So, ultimately I am the goose that lays the golden eggs. Like I say, we’ve come up with some intellectual property that we’ve licensed. We’ve managed to get over £10 million so far from the intellectual property licensing for the Upper Class Suite and we expect that there will be more to come from that. We’ve come up with more innovations that I would love to be able to tell you about, but I’ve been so busy during the recession that you’ll see that in a few more years. I thought I’d leave you with this slide. This is an image taken from Virgin Galactic and it just proves that the sky is no longer the limit. Thank you very much.