The Instant Icon
He has turned Copenhagen’s most beloved means of transportation into a lifestyle phenomenon. By designing a series of aesthetically pleasing and functional bicycles Jens Martin Skibsted has become famous in the design business with his spin on two-wheel transportation. With the philosophy of creating “instant icons” that generate free marketing, he is now designing products for multinational companies like Puma.
When you step inside the office of Jens Martin Skibsted you enter a white world of aesthetics mixed with simple functionalism. Everything- from the desks, chairs, wooden floors and leather sofa- is white, and everywhere- hanging on the walls or in the windows- you see white, grey or black bikes. The unique space could be located anywhere in the world, but the Danish self-taught designer has chosen to run his bicycle business Biomega and his consulting firm Skibsted Ideation from the heart of Copenhagen.
Both companies were “born global” as the American-French-Danish educated philosopher and project manager Skibsted states. Not so common for a Dane, the 36-year old company owner thinks global before anything. It’s natural to him. On top of that, he approaches design from a commercial angle from the beginning of the process. He is even certain that there is a method for making marketable, aesthetic design and he is in the process of formulating it. Following this definitive method it will be possible to create “instant icons,” he claims - and instant icons need no marketing budget. This philosophy has made Skibsted’s innovative design a global success and has turned his city bikes into a lifestyle phenomenon all over the world.
The light aluminium bike Copenhagen, designed by Jens Martin Skibsted himself, has been displayed in numerous magazines, museums and exhibitions worldwide. The international lifestyle magazine Wallpaper chose the Biomega bike as the most promising means of urban transport together with the BMW C1 and also voted it as one of the top Danish design products. The good press from media giants like CNN and the top technology and innovation magazine Wired have been worth $136 million USD in marketing, according to Skibsted’s calculations.
“Instant icon is an effective marketing tool, but a product needs to be surprising to be an instant icon. On a market where you traditionally have worked aesthetically you might have to think function to surprise and vice versa. Then you have to figure out what you need to do as a minimum to surprise. Everybody can think of making an inflatable bike, but successful innovation is closer to the already-existing,” he says, explaining the method he used to find an opening in the bike market. His research showed that the global bike market had two approaches: producers competed on price or on making the best functional sports bikes. Nobody competed on design. So Skibsted decided to make beautiful, functional bikes for urban users.
After that, companies like the international athletic-wear giant Puma became interested in Skibsted and his methods. Today he is the external (maybe outside?) designer with the longest working relationship with Puma. One of his designs for the company, a special folding Puma-bicycle, is now in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent exhibition in New York. But this was not his end goal:
“It is not my mission to promote design as art. As I see it, design is a commodity which the industry should use to make better products,” Jens Martin Skibsted says.
According to the magazine Wired, the Biomega approach- “call it form follows function follows fetishism”- seems to have struck a chord. The bike has been adopted by aesthetes all over the world. At Moss, a New York design shop located in Soho, a customer bought a Biomega-bike without any intention of ever riding it. During a burglary in the chic London furniture shop SCP, thieves took all the Biomegas, leaving everything else behind. But the stories don’t surprise Skibsted. He has a certain entrepreneurial belief in his projects that leaves little room for modesty. Faced with the question of how it feels to experience the great attention, he answers shortly:
“It’s really great, but I counted on it to happen.”
May 2007