When we think of product innovation at high-performance sports apparel companies, we tend to imagine a roomful of in-house creatives brainstorming over what will be the latest-and-greatest. But that’s not always the case, said Sugarhouse Creative’s director, Tara Latham.
“It can be tough for companies to build up and start a team in something like development concepts or advanced research and development—especially when there’s no timeline or specific end goal,” said Latham. “So even the larger, really well-established companies can find it difficult to staff for those roles.”
That’s where Sugarhouse Creative comes in. You could call them a technical innovation agency. Latham describes the company more practically as a “technical product solutions R&D company.” Essentially, other companies come to Sugarhouse when they need highly technical product conceptualization and design—not just in technical or performance apparel either. Sugarhouse has also worked on medical products such as respirators, to give just one example.
And occasionally, that work leads to a little extra innovation.
“We can’t help ourselves from taking it to the next level. Sometimes, that’s not what the client asked for, but we don’t want to stop our team from innovating,” explained Latham. “Our team has come up with quite a few potentially groundbreaking innovations, and we’ve chosen to commercialize those ourselves.”
Already familiar with IP from working with clients and their own projects, the Sugarhouse Creative team looked to AccelerateIP’s Stream 2 to take their IP strategy to the next level.
How did you find out about the Accelerate IP program?
We’ve participated in other Innovate BC programs, so we heard about it through their communications.
But we’re also part of the Innovation Island accelerator program, and they spoke very highly of AccelerateIP. They motivated us to prioritize it and helped us decide on Stream 2 as our starting point.
How much experience did you have with IP before starting the program?
Several members of our team had already done patent work for our company and other companies that they’d worked for. So for our current project, we’d already drafted most of the content for the two patents that we’re looking to file.
As soon as we started with AccelerateIP, we knew it was exactly what we were missing. We needed the strategic angle—it’s not just about drafting a patent, but about how to draft a patent from a commercial perspective. That was probably the most valuable part.
What changed in your IP strategy throughout the program?
We learned so much that we’ve changed our strategy quite a bit. We already had a lot of experience with product commercialization and IP, but not so much from a legal perspective. Our mentor company came in and helped us put some goal posts around what was possible and helped us understand the landscape a lot better.
That was a big pivot for us. In looking at the landscape, we found that there was quite a lot of competition. It sounds negative, but it’s actually pushed us to reach out and form strategic partnerships with some of the companies with existing patents.
What would you tell other startups or small companies about AccelerateIP?
To seriously look into it!
Doing the work now saves you a lot of time, money and resources down the road. We discovered that fact fairly acutely when we saw some big players in our market—we realized that we were the small fish and needed to be strategic. The AccelerateIP program really advanced our strategy.
If your startup is interested in accessing IP support to grow and protect your ideas and intellectual assets, apply for our AccelerateIP Program.
