Our latest example is the Anglesey North West Tidal Map, the first title in a new series developed by Mouse Design director Rich Taylor in collaboration with HARVEY Maps and Nick Cunliffe from Flow State Adventures.
The map brings together two longstanding parts of Rich’s life: more than 30 years of kayaking and a career spent designing and developing products. Conceived during his Advanced Sea Kayak Leader training, the idea grew from a simple question: could complex tidal information be made easier to understand and more useful on the water?
Several years of research, development and refinement followed. The result is a practical planning tool that visualises tidal streams around one of the UK’s most dynamic coastlines. It shows flood and ebb flows, tidal races, overfalls, tidal gates, access points and landing places, helping paddlers and other small-craft users build a clearer picture of how the water moves.
HARVEY Maps recently spoke to Rich about the thinking behind the product, his kayaking background and the ambition for the wider series. You can read the full interview in Reading the Tide.
The Tidal Map began as a personal project, but it also reflects something fundamental about the way we work at Mouse.
We understand the realities facing our clients because we are navigating many of the same challenges ourselves. We invest in ideas, test assumptions, find the right partners, make commercial decisions and take products into the market. That experience changes the questions we ask and the advice we give.
A good product is not simply a resolved piece of design. It also needs a clearly defined user, a compelling reason to exist, an achievable route to manufacture, the right commercial model and a credible route to market. Each decision affects the others, and all of them need to work together.
Launching the Tidal Map has meant considering far more than its visual design. It has involved organising and interpreting complex data, testing how information is understood, establishing a distinctive proposition, agreeing a viable partnership model and planning how one title can become a coherent series.
These are the less visible parts of product development, but they are often the parts that determine whether an idea succeeds.
One of the most important product decisions is deciding what not to build yourself.
HARVEY Maps brought specialist cartographic expertise, an established name in outdoor mapping and a trusted route to market. Just as importantly, its tough, lightweight and fully waterproof map material was already ideally suited to a product intended for use on a wet kayak deck.
That combination created a stronger proposition than either party could have produced alone. Rich brought the original concept, detailed understanding of the user and years of experience reading moving water. HARVEY brought mapping expertise, production capability, brand recognition and distribution. Nick having recently produced a Paddle North Wales a Sea Kayak Guide book brought detailed local knowledge.
The lesson is applicable far beyond maps: the best route forward is not always to develop every capability from scratch. Sometimes value comes from identifying the critical intellectual property and user insight you uniquely bring, then partnering with an organisation that can supply the detailed information, technology, manufacturing process or market access needed to make the proposition work.
The Tidal Map is also a useful contrast with some of our other work developing specialist dental training aids for Mouse Dental.
For the dental products, we have taken a manufacturing-led route: developing the product system, working closely with universities and technical partners, managing production considerations and building a repeat-sales model around physical training consumables.
The map followed a partnership and publishing route, using HARVEY’s established production technology and sales channels to turn specialist knowledge into a scalable product series.
There is no single correct formula for launching a product. The right model depends on the idea, the customer, the available technology, the investment required and the strengths of the partners involved. Having worked through these decisions on our own products, we can help clients assess them with practical understanding rather than design theory alone.
We remain a product design agency first, but one with direct experience of what happens after a concept leaves the studio.
We know the excitement of seeing an idea become real, but also the uncertainty, compromise and persistence involved. We know that development rarely follows a perfectly straight line. We know why commercial planning, testing, partnerships, manufacturing and distribution cannot be treated as an afterthought.
That is one of the things that makes Mouse different: we are busy doing the same thing our clients are trying to do.
The Anglesey North West Tidal Map is the first title in what is intended to become a wider series covering the UK’s key moving-water coastlines. It is also a tangible example of how personal insight, thoughtful design and the right commercial partnership can turn a long-held idea into a product people can buy and use.
Explore the Anglesey North West Tidal Map, or read HARVEY Maps’ interview with Rich: Reading the Tide.
Have an idea you want to bring to market? Mouse Design helps businesses move from early opportunity and product strategy through design, development and commercialisation. Talk to us about your product.
