Success. What is it? How does each of us define it in our lives? It’s a question that has hovered over many of the stories we’ve told in the last three years. Aimee Brown has been many things in her life – a snowboarder, a hydrologist, a pastry chef, a goat farmer and a writer. Always a writer. Being a wordsmith and making a living as one are two different things. Last year, Aimee got the opportunity of a lifetime a job writing for National Geographic. Excited, she packed her Subaru, threw in her cowboy boots and moved east from her beloved Oregon towards an incredible career.  After a few weeks of living in D.C. a nagging feeling set in. Were days looking out an office window, lonely treadmill runs and sun salutations without the sun success? Could you ever define it as such?  It took six thousand miles of driving for her to answer that question.

 

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Description

Company:
Quality Bicycle Products is searching for an Industrial Designer for our Product Design and Development Team. This position is the Industrial Design Lead with Salsa Cycles. As ID lead you’ll be responsible for product experience, concept development, and collaborative execution of product working with the Product Development Team to create products that drive value and competitive advantage for the Salsa Brand and other QBP Bike Brand assignments as needed.

Headquartered in Bloomington, MN, Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) is a leading distributor to the bicycle and outdoor industries. Committed to advocating for the bike industry and creating safe places to ride, we are a center of bike culture in the Twin Cities. Many of our 450+ employees are deeply passionate about biking and participate in every discipline, from freestyle to freeride. QBP owns five bike brands: All-City, Civia, Foundry, Salsa and Surly. QBP also owns Handspun, a custom wheel-building shop; and provides bike building and shock treatment services to bike shops across America. QBP encourages staff to use alternative transportation—especially bicycles—and provides generous commuter credits, indoor and outdoor bike racks, lockers, showers and a towel service.

Founded in 1981, QBP operates a LEED Gold-certified distribution center at its headquarters in Bloomington, MN and a new LEED-designed facility in Ogden, Utah. Rated as a top workplace in 2010 by both Outside Magazine and the Star Tribune, QBP is a high-performance company that continually seeks out top talent in a wide range of career disciplines. Through ACE, our advocacy, community service and environmental committee, our employees build the bike industry; help our community through volunteering and charitable giving; and practice environmental sustainability. By maintaining high standards of integrity and honesty, engaging partnerships inside and outside of QBP, and always striving to be better, we have built a community where employees feel they are part of something special. We offer competitive salaries, comprehensive healthcare packages and 401K plans. To learn more about QBP, please visit www.qbp.com. To learn more about Salsa Cycles and Adventure by Bike, please visit www.salsacycles.com

Job Summary:
The Industrial Design Lead for Salsa Cycles is responsible for leading product experience from conception of the product idea to dealer delivery. The individual is responsible for developing a compelling experience for each product that is in alignment with the brand experience and executing the design through delivery with the product development team.

Key Characteristics: Who Are You?
Product Design and Development hires on three key characteristics; Cycling Passion, Personal Leadership and Awareness, and Technical Ability.

The hire for this job exudes cycling passion. They have lost count of how many bikes they own, or how many are in the current fleet for that matter. They know each and every part on their bikes and have strong opinions about their favorite products.

The hire for this job is a team player, they don’t care where the idea came from, so long as it is the best one. They share openly and willingly with others to get the best results for the brand and organization. In fact, they can’t live without collaboration and instigate as necessary, knowing it brings the best results for nearly any project.

The hire for this job displays top notch Industrial Design skills and abilities, they think both strategically and creatively using sketching, modeling, and rendering to communicate their ideas to the team. They are constructive and critical in their feedback and expect the same of others. They are self motivated and highly self aware.

Above all, the hire for this job takes both work and play seriously. They know how to delineate between the two, maintain a sense of humor and get the job done. They are a character in and out of the workplace, but without an ego that turns others away.

Organizational Structure:
The Industrial Designer is part of the Product Design & Development team which is led by the Product Design & Development Manager and includes Designers and Engineers that serve all of QBP’s Bike Brands. The Industrial Designer will partner with Salsa Cycles Development team, lead by the Product Manager and supported by design, engineering, and art direction to develop product for the brand. Additionally, there will be periodic projects for other brands of QBP.
Principle Duties and Responsibilities
• Continually develop and advance the role of Industrial Designer at QBP.
• Collaborate within and across brand teams, working with all creative professionals to further develop the QBP Bike Brands and Product Development.
• Manage time across multiple projects and fully commit to hitting specific deadlines.
• Collaborate with the Product Manager to draft visual and written product experience briefs to be presented to the brand team. The Industrial Designer will be responsible for visual boards for all brand product.
• Be actively involved and engaged in the project planning process, outlining what activities will be involved, and outlining project timelines with the Product Managers.
• Collaborate with the Product Development team to develop the product features, function, and visual direction for the product through hand sketches, physical models, and digital renderings.
• Using 3D CAD software, model product concepts to production level detail, working with the engineering team to detail and analyze structural features.
• Document technical features, concepts, and ideas incorporated into the product to be provided to marketing and copyright for development of brand documents.
• Collaborate directly with the Art Director to develop overall and individual brand color repertoire, graphic, and product visual schemes that align product with brand experience. Product form and product graphics must be in alignment for each brand and across product range.
• Support and reinforce brand identity through continued development of visual form language. Own this activity for the brand.
• Communicate effectively with domestic and international manufacturers, vendors, suppliers, and sales departments. Communication strengths must be both written and verbal.
• Assemble and evaluate prototype bicycles and components.
• Be a technical resource for brand customer service
• Recognize new product opportunities and communicate them appropriately.
• Collaborate on projects with additional QBP brands as necessary.
• As requested, represent and participate in Salsa events, tradeshows, and marketing initiatives to represent the Brand as a member of the Salsa Crew.

Preparing food can be dangerous. The World Health Organization calls cooking "a threat to the lives of the great majority" of the world's population because so few households have a proper stove, instead cooking indoors over open flame. In sub-Saharan Africa, preparing a meal is too often a slow, dirty process that fills the home with smoke equivalent to puffing two packs of cigarettes a day. 

Danish biotechnology firm Novozymes is trying to combat these threats by building stoves that burn ethanol, rather than wood, in Mozambique. The company announced an ambitious goal at the Clinton Global Initiative this week: to provide alternative cooking fuel to 20 percent of Maputo, Mozambique's capital, by 2014. The company, known for making enzymes for biofuels, is partnering with the "food, energy and forest prevention company" CleanStar Ventures to offer an alternative ethanol-fueled stove and a locally-based system for producing the fuel.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 80 percent of homes burn charcoal or other biomass for cooking fuel, closer to cooking over a campfire than a kitchen range. To provide the charcoal for all those smokey ad hoc stoves, farmers have to chop down astonishing numbers of trees, which makes eating a danger to the planet, too. Already almost a third of Africa's forests have been lost, mostly to charcoal harvesters.

Thousands of huge bags of charcoal are transported throughout the Mozambique and sold as a source for heat and cooking. The World Health Organization estimates 2 million people die every year from the toxic combination of carcinogens and pollutants in cooking smoke.

Numerous companies are designing and producing cleaner stoves—the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves lists several. Many tackle the pollution problem by burning biomass more efficiently than open flame, thus consuming less wood and spewing less smoke. A few, like the BioLite stove, offer extras like electric power, enough to charge a cell phone and a fan that further helps reduce the poisonous plumes. But moving people away from wood-burning stoves altogether could solve several issues at once.

The biggest challenge to the Novozymes project is that it requires production of mass quantities of ethanol. "The development of a robust ethanol production, supply and distribution chain would be a necessary precursor to the widespread adoption of ethanol as a cooking fuel in Sub-Saharan Africa," says Radha Muthiah, executive director of the Alliance. 

So Novozymes is working to develop a fuel production system and train people to harvest sugary plants that produce ethanol. "Instead of the rural families slashing trees and making charcoal, they are going to become farmers," says Thomas Nagy, Novozymes' executive vice president. 

This project is notable because it applies systems thinking to make a sustainable, profitable cycle from local inputs and local ownership. "We expect the farmers to increase their daily income by a factor of four, five, six times," Nagy says. Many families make $1 a day or less harvesting charcoal, and grow just enough food to eat themselves because there isn't an adequate market system for selling excess.

"There's no incentive for them to grow more, because there is no market," Nagy says. "We are going to establish a sustainable agriculture community." Rural farming families will get access to an agri-forest system where they can grow cassava, beans, peas and other crops without cutting down trees. The beans and peas capture nitrogen from the soil, so they are used as rotation crops with the cassava, and can also be sold. 

CleanStar will buy any excess beans, peas and various fruits from the farming families. "We will then dry the fruits and package it ... and transport it to Maputo where it is sold," Nagy says. The cassava will be combined with Novozymes' specialty, enzymes, to become a clean-burning ethanol for the stoves. Five hundred families who own small plots of land are already trading with CleanStar as part of the project. 

To make large-scale cassava farming profitable, enough Maputo residents have to ditch their smoky culinary habits and switch to the company's ethanol stove. Cooking over an ethanol stove is a different experience, and many families resist the switch. Plus, the stove costs $30, a pretty steep price for families earning a few dollars a day.

"In a country with a per capita GDP of around $1,000, users cannot be expected to pay $30 upfront for a stove," says Muthiah of the Cookstove Alliance. "At the same time, substantially cheaper stoves are not likely to provide substantial health or environmental benefits." That's why she says public education must be included in plans like this one, so users are aware of better options. Innovative financing for customers is also crucial considering the high price, she says. That could mean discounts earned from carbon offsets, microloans, or other access to credit for businesses along the supply chain, especially women-run enterprises.

Novozymes and CleanStar are working with one such company, Zoe Enterprises, a female-founded local firm charged with distributing, marketing, and generally persuading the mothers of Maputo that cooking with ethanol is worth the extra cost. The pitch? It's cleaner, faster and, in the long run, might even be cheaper. Charcoal is getting more expensive as the forests near Maputo dwindle. As transport costs for charcoal increase, so does the price. 

That's part of why Nagy is optimistic Novozymes can scale up. By 2014, the partnership hopes to have 3,000 farmers, providing fuel for 80,000 households. The total market for alternative cooking fuel in sub-Saharan African, he says, is around $10 billion. That's big change, and big business. "Our hope is that we can show to the world that this is a very very sustainable business model," Nagy says. "Not only sustainable for [the] environment, deforestation, and health issues, but also that the joint venture is actually able to make money."

Photos courtesy of Novozymes

Considering renting or buying a cheap bike bike if I go to Japan.

The Green Pepper has everything you need to make outdoor clothing and gear using Green Pepper Patterns, including:

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