Midtown Member + Wilson Innovator, Ron Rocchi
Oct 28, 2020
The following is an interview conducted by and for Spirit Magazine with Midtown Member and Wilson Innovator, Ron Rocchi.
Spirit: Tell me about the Wilson Innovation Center.
Ron Rocchi: This facility is roughly 30,000 square feet. And it’s a research and development facility for Wilson sporting goods. It comes with three divisions so there are racquet sports, team sports, and golf. In the building, we’re doing all of the research and development of advanced innovation for those three divisions and all of the sports in those divisions. I’m in racquet sports so I’ve been primarily focused on performance tennis, but the groups that I interact with, we’re doing all the development for performance tennis racquets, commercial tennis rackets, squash, and more. As my title says, I have three jobs. As an advanced innovation manager, we’re trying to develop products for the future. We’re working at this moment, probably, I would say three to six years ahead. It’s necessary because the product life cycles are so fast now in the world, that, you know, a product lifecycle of two to two and a half years, you need to be three to five years out to keep up.
We’re coming up with what are the next great performance tennis rackets that we’re going to be selling in three to six years. The building was designed for what, which is unique, is called a closed-loop in that we wanted a place where we could think of an idea, just have an idea I want to do this, write it on a bar napkin somewhere, like, put it in your pocket and go to work the next day, and then take that idea, through all of the steps and stages to get the actual racket in your hand, all under this roof. And that’s pretty unique to Wilson, where we’ve taken the time to develop a process in the same location that allows us to do this very quickly and very accurately. And a lot of what I do is I’m supposed to fail a lot, and I was supposed to fail fast.
Because we’re trying 10 ideas that maybe one or two are going to work. Think about failing eight times out of 10. But that’s my job. That’s the job of someone like you have to wrestle with that in your head a little bit. So you know we try lots of crazy things, and we talked to the consumers a lot, we’re interacting with players of all skill levels all over the world to get their feedback on products to get their inputs into products. We don’t just sit around and say well we think it should be that, like we never, we just really want to engage with the people buying our products.
Spirit: How do you get that data?
RR: We go to different clubs and academies and, you know, for working on a game improvement racket you know for some of the older players that you have in your home. We tend to go to like Arizona and Florida rain revisits a bunch of clubs and we set up focus groups and talk to people and we do playtests with them, you know, so it’s a very robust information gathering so that we feel we know what our consumers are thinking and what they’re liking, you know, what are their purchasing habits, what are their preferences on paint finish, you know just all of this massive gathering of information that we take back and sort of start sifting through those he did that all in the house you don’t see.
Spirit: You mentioned you had three roles. Tell me about the global tour?
RR: And then so that’s like the player insights part of my job. And then the third part is a global tour. So, with my advanced innovation and my racket engineering plus being connected with the players in the sport and building new rackets, it was natural that the tour players would be someone I would take care of as well. So for 23 years, I’ve been working with the players on tour individually to what their needs are for their rackets. And that’s the cool part of the job that everyone wants to know about like that’s the library. You know, working with professional athletes is not easy. When I’m working with someone like Roger Federer, and we built a whole new racket for him, based on his needs and his preferences, then that racket goes right into our sales organization, because it’s a great update of modern pro staff, and we sell it in the world. Yeah. And then vice versa, if I’m working on something for you know people who play tennis in the world and I think it applies to a pro player, I can move it that way and say let’s try this. You solve a problem for someone in a unique way.
I want to give you a quick tour. The facility has three areas and I’m going to walk through them. The front area is sort of an engineering office area. The middle section is sort of what I would call product evaluation, which we do a lot of product evaluation here, both in performance and durability. And then the third part, which is in the back of the building is our machine shop. And that’s a very important part of our process so what I think we should do is I want to walk you through the process of how a racket becomes real. I love that because that’s what we do here and we want to do it in this quick amount of time as possible. When we have that sort of idea that you sketched, I need to start making an engineering drawing or sometimes I take it to an industrial designer. There’s a lot of iteration exploration that goes on. Well, we had those like custom events at Midtown where people could kind of go in and learn where they can add the customization on some of that was huge people just because they like their team color. And so that’s a blocking sort of template. The trick is to try to find the optimal design of the frame which is eventually going to be in carbon fiber to meet the performance you’re trying to achieve for the right player. We have this concept for a frame, we can push and pull dimensions we can run it through some computer testing to see what some of the parameters will be. And this is a really important process because once we make the mold. You can’t change it.