Bintel Interview with Patricia Roller

This is our continued series of interviews with leaders in Sustainability. We had a chance to sit down with Patricia Roller on April 17, 2023 for a wide ranging discussion on her current work and outlook for the future. The transcript has been edited for this format. 

Screen Shot 2023-05-04 at 9.02.59 AMPatricia Roller
CEO of Vidlet and Co-Founder of Frog Design

Patricia is the CEO of Vidlet, a company in the research-technology space that combines design research capabilities with video technology for high impact across industries and continents.

Before Vidlet, Patricia was the Co-CEO of Frog Design, now part of Capgemini Invent, where she was instrumental in nourishing a creative culture while driving business metrics for the company and its clients before orchestrating the sale of the company in 2006.

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Tom Marsh: It's good to see you and thanks for meeting with us today. If you could start by giving us a little bit of your background, in particular, your work at Frog Design. That phase of your career, how you got into design and what's changed in design over the years? 

Patricia Roller: When I started it was 35 years ago with Steve Jobs at Apple. Hardly anyone talked about design. But what was interesting is back then, design was still very much hardware focused. People back then also talked about sustainability, but you couldn’t design the computer and make it 100% sustainable. It was going to end up in a landfill. I started in design at age 23, when Steve Jobs brought us to the U.S. He said, “Help me figure out a strategy for product design at Apple.” 

Tom Marsh: Is this the original Mac? 

Patricia Roller: Not the original. 

Tom Marsh: Is this Steve Jobs 1.0 or 2.0? 

Patricia Roller: I would say it's still 1.0. There was already a Mac, but it was very basic, and very still 1.0. Computers at that time were still very ugly. I think what's interesting about that is people think of Steve Jobs as this design genius, right? But what he did at the time was just layout a vision. Lead the vision of what he wanted Apple to be, not look like, but feel like. What do I want the culture of Apple to be? A couple years ago I found this book called, RedBook. There was this definition of what he wanted Apple to be. And by today's standards, it would be incredibly naive. But that's how you start creating a corporate culture and design culture. Maybe a sustainability culture. Whatever your mission is, because we always see these things after someone has achieved it. But we never look at them when they start it. So, that's how I got into design. 

Tom Marsh: Wow, that's cool. Was that the Mac that led to the famous Super Bowl ad with IBM versus Apple? It wasn't even Microsoft. 

Patricia Roller: It was IBM employees walking off the Cliff, the 1984 Super Bowl ad. 

Tom Marsh: Exactly, such an epic moment in tech. 

Patricia Roller: I think it’s courageous in so many ways as a small company going up against your big competitor but think about where IBM is today. Though people still buy IBM computers, I think they sold them to, Lenovo. But I think that's also just a lesson there, right? You pick your target, you're brave going up against it. You have a little bit of an attitude. And it didn't always work out for Apple? I mean, like you mentioned Steve 2.0 still had some dark times, right? Because you still have to scale. You still have to sell. Attitude alone doesn't do it, but if you can combine great product experiences and good corporate culture, go for it. 

 

“HARDLY ANYONE TALKED ABOUT DESIGN.” 

 

Tom Marsh: So, Frog Design was right in the middle of that era! When design entered my consciousness was in the 90’s when he was Steve Jobs 2.0 with the iMac and the color and translucent plastic. It was visually super exciting. From there Apple just never looked back. In that respect, how many clients or companies have you either worked with or were close to?  

Patricia Roller: We often talked about that and said, “Hey, Steve figured it out, what is a good process for good people to come up with good innovative solutions. And yes, this is football, running down the field and everyone else runs behind them. But theoretically, everyone could do it, but as you know, corporate product development is very complex, often very political. And that leads me into starting Vidlet because the one thing I learned from that time is that people that make a product successful are always the end users, and understanding what end users want. And Steve was just brilliant about that. Maybe intuitively, people often say he didn't use research, but I think he was very observant. And in some ways, despite his big persona, he was also very humble. In understanding how do I democratize products, how do I make them for everyday people? Because that's the only way you make them successful. You can’t build them in an ivory tower. You need the user to accept them. 

Tom Marsh: How has the globalization of supply chains affected your work over the last 20 years? I think back to the time when you got started and I was early in my career, everything was pretty local. It was uncommon for people to think, “Oh, well, I'm going across the world to build this thing in six different countries before we finally put it together and sell it.” 

Patricia Roller: In some ways, Frog’s secret to success was that we were able to go to these early vendors in Taiwan when he wasn't even in China yet. Only engineers in Taiwan and then later manufacturers in China could see how to consistently do things. We would not have a cohesive product experience. So, I think that was the the big milestone back then, let's make it cohesive. Let's use CAD to make things consistent. I mean, people don't think about CAD anymore because you can have it almost on your iPhone now, right? But back then it cost an insane amount of money. I know you and I are talking about NASA too, right? I mean, that's a lot of technology that was invented that made it to design companies like ours. Companies today don't invest in that type of stuff anymore. But I think that was very important. Like how do we consistently design products no matter where they are being built? 

Tom Marsh: Back then, was there any discussion about sustainability in the environmental sense? Did that ever come up or was it a more recent phenomenon? 

Patricia Roller: Sustainability concerns have always been around. But we looked at it more in terms of when you have a computer or an iPhone or whatever it is, you will use plastic, you will use silicone, you will use screens, and they will never be 100% sustainable. So, we were looking at it at the time more in terms of what can be saved. Can we save a little bit of plastic? Can we make the housing a little bit thinner? The goal should always be, how can we do better? And if not, let's not do it at all. So, sustainability is a tough one. Because as we see consumers buy stuff and marketing pushes products. So, I think we must make incremental improvements and not think we can change the world overnight. 

Tom Marsh: Do you subscribe to the conventional premise that green things or sustainable products are going to have a premium associated with them because it costs more to design that way, to build things that way, etc.? And where do you think the consuming public is with respect to being willing to pay a premium? 

Patricia Roller: Well, it's either consume more, recycle more, or use less, right? And what I see with young people today is definitely a willingness to buy used. That's why almost every retailer now has a resale channel. Which I find phenomenal because these fragments are sometimes not necessarily cheap. Resale is pretty expensive. Oftentimes the resellers have to refurbish the products. But I think young people today are more aware of that and more willing. I mean recycled clothing sales is a good business. Now, who would have thought that? I mean, initially we only had targeted resellers, I think thredUp is one of them, especially when it comes to clothing. Now companies like Nordstrom have their own used clothing lines that are profitable. 

Tom Marsh: Do you think one of the primary features of our platform should be facilitating communication with the consumer? Why not make that available to the consumer in the store? You hit the barcode with your phone, and it tells you everything you need to know about sustainability as it relates to that product. You know what it's made from, where it comes from, how close it is to contributing or not to net zero, full transparency at the point of purchase. 

 

"YOU CAN BUILD TRUST OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME,

AND YOU CAN RUIN IT OVERNIGHT."

 

Patricia Roller: What I like about Bintel is that you guys can share that data right away and get that data collected to visualize it. I think it needs to be visualized in a really good way and then presented to end users where they understand it. A lot of that is often perceived as corporate greenwashing, right? We give you some sustainability data and no one knows where it comes from. That's why I like working with Bintel because you can trace it back exactly to the accounts it came from. So, I think there are great opportunities around that information. How is it made and what does it cost? What is it? What did it cost in human terms? We often hear about factories in China, right, that negate human needs. I think we have made good progress but if we can trace all of that, I think it would be good for consumers.. You will still find the consumer that just wants to get the cheapest price. And that goes back to a lot of people living off minimum wage in the US, right? So how can I tell someone to be socially conscious, sustainability focused, if they can't feed themselves? So, I think we need to work on all of these things. 

Tom Marsh: I agree with you. We've built compliance and traceability into the platform as you just mentioned. One of the key benefits is establishing the credibility of what you're telling them.  If they feel like it's greenwashing, then they’re not going to pay attention. But to the extent that they can click all the way back to a compliance certificate from a manufacturing place in Vietnam, you know that's taking it about as far as you can. But if you don't make that information available right at the point of purchase, you're probably going to miss most people, because not a lot of consumers are going to spend hours online researching no matter how well-intentioned and transparent you are, right? 

Patricia Roller: And I think you also have to tell a story, right? You cannot just put the label on there and say, this is why this is more sustainable, tell the story of how the product traveled, where was it made. There are so many steps to a product being sourced and I think you have to show the whole journey and not just pick the part you like. 

Tom Marsh: Right. How much of that trust is an extension of the trust that people have in the company, as opposed to a brand? 

Patricia Roller: That's actually a very interesting question. I think people trust brands when they are small and tell their story like the young founders or the young company that comes up. Young companies are focusing on sustainability, focusing on telling their story, the user story, and why it matters. 

Tom Marsh: Going back to the Steve Jobs conversation, to some degree, people became Steve Jobs fans, and they trusted him whether they should have or not, even though it became a huge public company. And we all wondered what would happen after he left. But there's some interesting research that I've done on trust, and the academics tend to refer to it as essentially a contract between two people. That's really the foundation of trust, and you can't really push that off onto a corporation or onto some third entity. It still comes down to people trusting people or trusting somebody that they trust.  Which is an interesting problem from a communications point of view. It takes a long time. 

Patricia Roller: It takes a long time or in reverse, and this goes back to what Bintel can do with data. It could also be the reverse, like we are doing a study on drinking water right now. And it's amazing how much consumers trust institutions, children in school drinking water for example. Long term municipalities for clean water, and we have heard horror stories about that right where the trust was broken. But I think humans like to innately trust. I think you just must reaffirm the trust and most definitely not to break it. 

Tom Marsh: Right. I think it was Stephen Covey, where he talked about the bank and how you basically build trust a little bit at a time over a long period of time. You can't put a lot of trust in the bank quickly, but you can withdraw all of it in one wrong move. For example Silicon Valley Bank right? 

 

"IMPROVE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH, USE LESS RESOURCES AND IT'S BETTER FOR YOU PERSONALLY AND IT'S BETTER FOR THE PLANET."

 

Patricia Roller: Yeah, it’s not the company that was broken, the company was probably still pretty robust, but the customers didn't trust it anymore. So, you can build trust over a long period of time, and you can ruin it overnight. As we all know, even in personal relationships, right? 

Tom Marsh: Yeah, I know. Now that I know you did one of those first Macs, I'm really just dying right now, but anyway... 

Patricia Roller: I have some in the garage. I can show you some old models. 

Melanie Marsh: You shared with me recently a project you were working on or an area of research around digital sustainability. I was wondering if you could speak to that?  

Patricia Roller: I mean to choose sustainability was a total surprise for me when we talked to people in an industry that is known to really promote themselves with a lot of marketing. This was for a hotel chain that is known to use a lot of digital assets, be very loud, digitally use a lot of videos. And the head of marketing told us that their customer base is asking for them to actually tone things down, right? Because of an awareness that if you use a lot of graphics, you lose a lot of energy, and he called it trial sustainability, and I found that especially interesting at the time when we all talked about the metaphors, right? So, I wonder where that goes. That discussion between the materials using insane amounts of energy with, in all honesty, I have not seen a lot of value beyond entertainment. You guys tell me if I'm wrong, but I have only seen it like in the entertainment environments, gaming environments, and map that against young consumers saying I want to live a digitally sustainable life. I want things to consume less energy and I'm not sure yet whether it's going to go. But I think that’s a contradiction because everyone is hyping the metaphors right now. But if these young consumers have always grown up with high energy, high graphics, high everything, and they go, maybe I don't need this. It will be interesting to see how the market responds. 

Melanie Marsh: Yeah, I think this concept of digital sustainability is really interesting. 

Patricia Roller: I think so too, especially if we can tie consumption more and more to mental health in young people. 

Melanie Marsh: I was just going to say that.  

Patricia Roller: That's where the connection is. That more and more young people are suffering from mental illness and depression. And this is not just statistics. They are openly talking about their mental health concerns. I think we need to wonder if that comes from over consumption, and maybe the two things go hand in hand. Right? Improve your mental health, use less resources and it's better for you personally and it's better for the planet. If we can accomplish those two things, what's not to like? 

Tom Marsh: I know we've talked about shipping in the past in various contexts. How much work do you see with packaging and the on demand, ship it same day Amazon service? With all of us having piles of cardboard boxes and packing material now stacking up in the garage that we must go try and recycle? Is an emphasis on packaging a particular problem in your work now or is that something that isn't mainstream yet? 

Patricia Roller: I wish there would be more awareness, so from a user perspective, what we are saying is that users like packaging. I want something. I want it now, instant gratification, right? So, our good intentions of having less packaging and maybe delay gratification, are good intentions in reality, I think when it comes to shipping. People want it now. We did some work on returns, and I think there's retailers now understanding that when people have bought something and it's on their credit card, they cannot afford to ship it back and buy something new where they tie the return back to, hey, if you return X, you buy from me again, I’ll give you the credit now. And that's so pervasive for consumers because I think so many consumers live on the edge of their credit line. So, I think it almost goes the other way around where shippers are trying to focus more on, all you want is to return something. Let me quickly give you something back. So, I think that is a spiral that goes the other way from a consumer perspective in my mind. 

Tom Marsh: Can we come back to Apple in terms of packaging, this is a different part of packaging. I mean I have a stack of different Apple product boxes in my closet. Because those packages are so beautiful. They're so nicely done. I can't put them in the trash. The way I do the brown boxes from Amazon, right? And I remember, you know, a long time ago, the first company that ever started doing that was Sony.  You'd get a Sony TV, with this beautiful box with very nice little handles to pull things out-of-the-box and all that stuff. And everybody was wow, this is crazy. And now of course, Apple has taken that approach too. Melanie, maybe you should come in on this because I think you've worked on sustainable packaging materials?  

 

"APPLE PACKAGING IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT I THINK THE DEMAND ON DESIGN IS THEN TO MAKE IT BOTH BEAUTIFUL, CREATE AN EXPERIENCE AND MAKE IT MORE SUSTAINABLE."

 

Melanie Marsh: Yeah, I know things like sustainable cosmetic films and a lot of packaging research that's going on to improve. But I mean, none of that packaging is recyclable. So, it's beautiful and it's terrible for the environment. So that's what it is right now. And there's always this sort of compromise or question when it comes to luxury, and it comes to the aesthetic and design. We were working with luxury brands in Europe and when it came down to it, the creative teams weren't willing to have less lighting or taking a metallic out, even if it was more sustainable. So, it depends on the company, where design, aesthetic and sustainability and engineering come together. Where the priorities are. But I think they have a lot of potential to do better, that's for sure. 

Patricia Roller: That’s the demand on the design, right? How can we make it have that same experience from unpacking? An Apple product that is undoubtedly delightful. That's why you're keeping them, Tom. I cannot blame you. I don't know what you do with them, but yeah, the Apple packaging is beautiful, but I think the demand on design is then to make it both beautiful, create an experience, and make it more sustainable. 

Tom Marsh: When they take the iPhone in on a trade at the Apple Store, they should give me an extra credit if I bring the box. 

Patricia Roller: If you bring the box back, yes. And by the way, I think they're doing a really good job in paying people a good price for their returned products. I mean, you can only fight one battle at a time, but I think Apple is doing a really good job at taking products back. I think it used to be through third-party vendors. I think now they do it directly, right? There was obviously money in that business, but that's a good start. 

Tom Marsh: I think rare earth minerals are driving some of that in that there's just this tiny amount in there, but it's so expensive. 

Patricia Roller: It's expensive. 

Tom Marsh: And so critical, and those supply chains are all for the most part in China. 

Patricia Roller: No. We want our own. 

Tom Marsh: I'm curious as to whether you are more or less optimistic as it relates to climate and social issues today? Working with clients, working with companies, working with younger people are you more or less optimistic? 

Patricia Roller: Well, my nature is always to be optimistic. So, I'm optimistic for a couple of reasons. Normally all the people say to younger people back in the days, we did it this way, but I'm really excited what I see in young, educated people again. Back to the water study we are doing right now with students, and the students are phenomenal, like especially high school and early college students, where they focus on sustainability. They bring their recyclable water bottle. So, I'm really excited about the young generation. We think we have invented all the good things but we have some work to do, batteries for example. I think we sometimes come up with band-aid solutions for a short amount of time, but we are good innovators. If we focus on education, we will innovate and will do good things. 

Tom Marsh: I couldn't agree more. 

Patricia Roller: We put our head in the sand when it comes to facts. But Tom, that's why companies like Bintel also exist. I think we need to keep providing people the data and be transparent. Build trust. Not sure if that's happening in politics right now, but it can happen, right? Maybe institutions can fill in data that is important. 

Tom Marsh: Yeah, I agree. I think that the part that is a little bit troubling is the technology. We've talked about generative AI a little bit before. That type of innovation needs to be closely supervised if not regulated.  Relying on scientists to regulate themselves given nation states, competition and other factors, is a very risky proposition. You know, these young people are going to sort it all out. They may not have any use for all of us old people, but they'll figure out how to keep the climate in the world from messing up, right? 

Patricia Roller: Right. What we learn, by the way, in educational research is that young people are getting smarter and smarter. But they take less risks, it’s the risk taking we need to work on. Failure is a good thing, you know? Expressing yourself without worries. And in those other important things, I tried to teach that to my children, but then they always tell me I'm totally inappropriate when I do that. 

Tom Marsh: I've heard that too. I think that's interesting that you raised that point and we haven't talked about it. But having worked over in Singapore, China, and Europe, one of the biggest differentiators in our culture is our willingness to embrace risk takers and people trying things?  Generally speaking, as a society, they didn't tolerate people going out on a limb and doing crazy stuff the way we do here. I mean, sometimes the crazy stuff is nonsense but other times it's brilliant. 

Patricia Roller: One of the reasons I left Germany and now I'm an American citizen is for exactly that reason. I could not do the things I'm doing now. Even starting a company, I could decide right now that I want to start a company. I could drive to Sacramento and start the company by the end of today. Depending on what time it is in Germany, would take me six months. You can make a difference.
America is still the best country for innovation, no doubt about it. So, we have to keep it that way...and, no politics. I can see that. 

Tom Marsh: On that note, I’d like to thank you for this great interview.

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For more information on our current partnership with Patricia Roller and her company Vidlet, Inc., please check out our previous blog post.

Topics: sustainability, Design Strategy, Design Innovation, Vidlet, Data Analytics, Data Driven Styling, Digital Sustainability, Thought Leadership, AI Powered Insight, Apple, Frog Design

Tom Marsh

Written by Tom Marsh

Tom has served as CEO of Bintel since cofounding the company in 2019. Before that he was COO of ai-one inc. where led the projects for NASA Marshall, SwissRe, Boeing and FedEx. For the past 15 years he has specialized in artificial intelligence applications for enterprise and government with a critical integration of Subject Matter Experts, AI, data, and visualizations. For FedEx this included topic classification and visualization of customer experience data collected weekly from survey data on FedEx.com. A project with an Army military intelligence group involved the development of a sophisticated intelligence platform that included GEOINT and provided situational awareness for an allied military. His current mission is to bring that caliber of solutions to counties in the West.