Way back in 1990, I’d just started my business and was out looking for clients. At a trade show I got talking to a couple of guys selling car accessories like air fresheners and sunroofs, the kind where you had to cut a hole in the roof!
They’d just come back from Australia, where they’d seen a product called The Club. It was a steering wheel lock, but clunky, awkward to fit, and not actually that hard to defeat. We thought there might be an opportunity to do something better.
When you’re designing accessories, you want to make one product fit as many vehicles as possible, which means finding what’s common across all the variations. In this case, that meant studying steering wheels, lots and lots of them. I spent hours walking around London, peering into parked cars and taking photos, trying not to get arrested!
Then one afternoon, walking home from my office in Chiswick, it clicked. Every steering wheel I’d looked at had spokes, but none of them had any in the top half.
Once you see it, it’s obvious.
You need a clear line of sight to the dials, so the top section is always unobstructed. That single observation made the rest of the idea possible. It meant a lock could pass through the open section at the top of the wheel, underneath the rim, and that became the core of the product.
It launched in the early 90s and at the time, there was no real sense this was going to become a big category – just a good idea that solved a problem. Thirty-five years on, it’s still a top seller. I was in Halfords last week picking something up for my car, and there it was, sitting on the shelf. After 35 years, that’s quite something.