Meet the Essmart sales team that trialled GravityLight

Essmart Global is an organisation with a mission to bring essential, life-improving products to all people. They work in Tamil Nadu with a network of  sales executives and shop owners to help build strong last mile distribution for great products.

Essmart shared GravityLight with 14 of their sales executives and shop owners – people very familiar with the needs of their customers and  communities, who would be able to give open and insightful feedback.

They had several positive thing to say about GravityLight:

“Great! Works on gravity.”

“Doesn’t need anything else to run.”

“Very useful, mostly here in hilly areas without sunlight and battery.”

12 out of 14 of Essmart's team said they would recommend GravityLight to friends and family.

They  also provided us with useful feedback, from the need for GravityLight to be brighter to the recommendation for an instruction guide in the local language.

We had provided a pictorial installation guide – designed to be universally understood regardless of language or literacy. Interestingly, Damodar, their sales executive in Mettupalayam, felt that  installation guides in Tamil (the local language) would be more easily understood than diagrams.

Demonstrations and installation support will be central to our approach to spread awareness and encourage people to switch from kerosene to GravityLights, however we also have to pre-empt scenarios where one-to-one support may not be provided. It raised several interesting questions for us to explore:

• How much can materials be standardised, across the many countries GravityLight will be used, and how much national and local tailoring will be needed?
• How can we ensure that illiterate people or those who haven't had the chance to see a demo on how to install GravityLight, can easily understand the set up instructions?
• How can we make the next generation GravityLight -GL02 - even easier to install?

Thanks to the Essmart team for gathering this feedback on our first GravityLight prototypes!

Find out more about the next generation GravityLight: GL02 - crowdfunding now on Indiegogo!