METSTRADE spoke to company co-founder Oscar Mead, to ask about the inspiration and development processes that led to TeamO Marine’s 150N Hi-Lift Lifejacket & Harness being recognised as this year’s prestigious overall DAME Design Award winner at METSTRADE.
Tell us about your business
TeamO was founded 10 years ago in direct response to a tragedy at sea. I was doing a lot of solo sailing at the time, with a Vendee Globe project as my goal. Then one day in 2011, my sister called. She said someone had been killed on a race she was participating in when he fell overboard. It turned out that he had been clipped on and tethered to the boat, which was moving, but he drowned. In that specific scenario, with the attachment point on the front of the lifejacket, a conventional harness doesn’t work.
It prompted us to create a solution to that problem which became the BackTow Harness. To develop it we took an old sample of an existing life jacket, modified its harness, and tested it by towing me behind boats up and down the Solent in the UK. The improvement in safety with our concept was so dramatic that we thought we would have to start our own business, which was a change from where I was expecting to go with my career.
How easy has it been to create a new business in the tightly regulated marine safety products sector?
We see it as a great strength that we don’t have a long history because it means not being handicapped by preconceptions about what will work within the industry. We go out, cast our net wide and ask what is cool, what works, what is interesting and what can we draw from as inspiration? However, the regulatory side is a high barrier to entry. We’ve had to learn at a prodigious rate and overcome a vertical learning curve each time we want to develop something new.
In some ways the regulatory barriers to entry hurt our industry because people don’t take risks to move outside accepted norms. You really don’t want to devote a lot of R&D time, then pay €20,000 to have a product tested, only to find out that it doesn’t pass.
When we came up with the concept for the BackTow Harness the issue was there had never been a releasable harness before. We thought it would be easy, but it took us about three and a half years before we got it passed by a regulator after achieving enough data through testing to prove it was safe and worked consistently. Eventually we reached the compromise we’re utilising today where we have a manually releasable harness. It meets all the requirements of the ISO standard with a front attachment in its stowed condition, just like every other lifejacket. If you pull the handle to release the harness (to its alternate attachment point at the back), then you move out of the scope of the standard, but this enables a tethered casualty to be turned into a face-up position in the water.
Once the BackTow Harness was approved how did you progress the business?
Our Offshore 170N model was our first lifejacket and the first to include the BackTow Harness technology. That product was the springboard for our business. From there we created a range of lifejackets and named them after the types of use that they are designed for.
Journalists were saying we had the best harness on the market, but our bladder design was average. That was a deliberate move by us at the time, because BackTow was radical, so we wanted to stay with a conventional bladder form. There can be too much new content in a product to achieve market and regulatory acceptance. Others were ahead with bladder design at that time, but as a brand-new company we also didn’t have the resources to develop and seek approval for new solutions in that area.
What triggered the development of the 150N Hi-Lift Lifejacket & Harness?
It was while testing around three years ago that we started to focus on upgrading our lifejacket bladder tech. While taking loads of pictures of people being towed backwards, I was noticing how much of the bladder’s volume was deployed above the water. That’s when we realised that we should push the buoyancy down and under the surface where it could work to lift the mouth of the wearer significantly further away from the water.
How did you turn theory into practice?
I usually start the design process with pencil drawn sketches. Then we move to developing through iterative physically tests. Placing buoyancy on the back felt counter intuitive to stability, so although the product we have today is quite a close visual match to my initial sketches, we initially started testing with a much smaller pouch underneath. Once in the water we quickly realised how much volume you could put underneath the shoulders and added more and more buoyancy to the pillow. The motion is a lifting motion, not a rolling one. By dragging the volume down lower on the chest and with some around the sides of the body we were getting so much stability from the front of the jacket that we could keep adding volume at the back.
An unintended further benefit of the back pillow is it also creates a bow-shape on the back of the neck if being towed by the BackTow Harness. This means you are lifted out of the water before your head and shoulders get to the wave that you create. As the water flows around the bladder it accelerates and the level drops because of Bernoulli’s principle, so we increase the protection around the head and shoulders of the wearer.
Our development steps initially created a much bigger jacket than we intended, but through testing we realised could be scaled back without compromising performance. We’ve worked hard to make the Hi-Lift a soft, flexible, sculptured jacket that you can wear for long periods of time. The RNLI UK lifesaving organisation has a great saying, which is ‘useless unless worn’. Lifejackets have traditionally been a bit of an afterthought in the industry. When I first started there was an ethos that proper sailors didn’t wear lifejackets. That viewpoint is changing for the better now, but having a lifejacket that is comfortable to wear is also a part of the solution.
We’re here to facilitate people’s adventures by making great products. That means we’ve got to make safety equipment that people can comfortably wear long-term, especially if going offshore.
You seem to spend a lot of time in the water with your products?
In-water testing is important, and we run worst possible case scenarios when doing so. For the BackTow Harness the most difficult test is to use a really long line with a boat attachment point at water level or just below (so there is no lift). It’s an unlikely scenario for a typical yacht man overboard incident but we want to know what the results are. Using this test with our older lifejacket designs you get splashed around your head and it’s a bit unpleasant. With the 150N Hi-Lift I was towed backwards at about eight knots, going upwind in 20 knots of breeze with breaking waves and it was amazing and perfectly survivable. It proved how well Hi-Lift and BackTow technologies combine to take a huge step forward.
How long does it take to gain regulatory approval?
What we have these days that we didn’t have when we started 10 years ago is an understanding of the process. It is much less stressful now because we validate that the product meets all criteria, ahead of time.
We conduct pool testing and structural testing in-house using test subjects from 50kg-120kg-plus with different body sizes and shapes. During the last 18 months of development, we work through all the criteria that will then be formally assessed by the independent test house. We send our data in with the product; the test house does all the same tests again and we typically find that our results are within a couple of degrees and a couple of millimetres of the declared measurements.
It can be nerve-wracking waiting for the official stamp but we’re confident Hi-Lift will be in shops at the end of March 2025.
What are you doing to keep your business innovative now you’re not the new kid on the block?
We’re becoming established, as you indicate in this question. One of the nice things for us is our small range of products, and we plan to keep it that way; we don’t want to end up with a huge back catalogue that hangs behind us.
We expect as a business to try and make each of our own products redundant every 10 years. If we’re doing our job, then every time you decide it is time to buy a new lifejacket, we should have taken a significant leap forward.
Hi-Lift technology will roll out on other lifejackets in the range as a part of this continual relaunch process. The BackTow Harness is also being adopted by some other OEMs.
The Hi-Lift concept is toned down at this point because it’s something radically new for the industry. The 150N launch model isn’t the ultimate end design that we’ve already conceptualised. There are still significant gains in performance and size and weight reduction to be achieved through changes in the technologies that we use. These will be easier to introduce once the Hi-Lift bladder design is perceived as being a new normal.
