Sisu - Your Exercise Data As Art

So we’ve been a little quiet of late. The reason? We’ve been working on a new project called Sisu, but more by chance and good fortune than by design.

Having spent an evening downloading and tinkering with my own personal exercise data from Strava and Runkeeper, I decided that i’d like to design a print of my training efforts from 2013.

The result was this…

For much of 2013, I was recovering from ACL reconstruction in my left knee. I spent most of the year enduring weights at the gym. As the year came to an end, I ventured outside to chance a run or two, 69 to be precise. I was pleased with the design and shared it on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

The response I received was brilliant. People really seemed to relate to the idea of presenting their training efforts in a more visually appealing way.

I decided to reach out and see if a few of my followers would be interested in their own version of the print. I collected their data and proceeded to ship more prints. The feedback has been great. There have been more and more ‘shares’ of the work across the web and as a result more people contacting me for their own print.

A week or so after sharing my initial design, I seemed to be spending more and more of my time making prints for other people. To date we’ve shipped to Manchester, Oxford, Chicago and San Francisco. As a result we decided to launch the service as a product, with an actual website.

Sisu - Your Exercise Data As Art, was born.

The word ‘sisu’ is Finnish and means determination, bravery, and resilience.

“Sisu is about taking action against the odds and displaying courage and resoluteness in the face of adversity.” - Wikipedia

We launched Sisu over the weekend and the response has been overwhelming. We’re taking orders from around the globe, rushing around trying to fulfil everyones requirements whilst scaling our system to better automate the process. We’re busy sourcing print fulfilment companies to handle the orders whislt trying to remain as flexible as possible with regards to customer requirements.

As far as our website goes, we’re strong advocates of Lean. We worked as quickly as we could to get an MVP live. We’re able to capture people’s Strava credentials, contact users via Intercom and manage the order process comfortably.

However, there is significant detail missing which would certainly make the process far clearer and easier for customers. But that’s the aim of an MVP right - to test the validity of an idea with minimal cost/expense in time and money, before accelerating the process of iteration in order to best service our clients.

The wheels are in motion with regards to iterating Sisu and we’re well on our way to validating our idea. So stay tuned for more products, a better design and checkout process and all in all, more beautiful prints.

We welcome any feedback you may have about Sisu. Please don’t hesitate to contact us at: hello@madewithsisu.com.