This is a long one

And especially for our super funders, because we want you to be the first to know. If you’d prefer just read the perks stuff and read the rest later 🙂

Perks

There are a couple of people who haven’t had their perks yet and a few who still haven’t collected theirs.

I’ll be reaching out to those people over the next few days please keep an eye out or feel free to email me directly on naveed@andiamo.io.

We will also be moving the Thank You Wall to a more prominent space on our site to highlight the importance of your support.

By the time you read this

A few big things would have happened.

We’ve fitted another 3 families, which you can read more about below.

Andiamo has been selected as Sir Richard Branson’s favourate startup after pitching in Sydney and won the opportunity to go to Necker Island to be part of a global social impact week supported by Virgin.

Yesterday it was announced at Critical Mass that we had won the Trailblazing Newcomer Award for the Natwest SE100. This recognises a combination of sustainable financial growth and positive social or environmental impact, and is awarded to a newcomer social enterprise that is demonstrating excellent business practice within the sector.

But more importantly….

How are we doing on our promise?

It is nearly a year since our campaign closed and your amazing support meant we could open the first version of the Andiamo service to families.

So how have we done so far?

Promise 1: Creating a prototype service and orthoses for 3 families

Shark attack

A month after the funding ended we were able to scan the first two children in December and quickly turned around the first designs to be printed.

The fitting was planned for February 2015, which we expected to test how well the orthoses fit and what tweaks were required.

We hit two delays in doing this:

1) We were invited over to the USA to pitch on their version of Dragon’s Den called Shark Tank. We believed it would be able to accelerate our ability to work with more families. We miscalculated this and lost several weeks preparing for it.

2) It would have been very easy to recreate a current orthosis. However, we want to solve the hard problems first, and that includes combining reduced weight with strength.

We understand the core of these problems and understand that the material science still has to catch up to what we are able to design. This is getting closer and we have found design workarounds that we are currently testing. The child’s safety and comfort is paramount for us so we are being very cautious in this area.

First fitting and starting again

Our first fitting took place 14th April for Sahara and even though it was 5 months later than planned it fitted perfectly.

It fitted so well it meant that she was able to wear her ballerina shoe rather than a shoe that is one size larger.

Whilst the fitting was perfect we were not happy with how strong the material was and so had to go back to redesign it for higher strength, without sacrificing low weight.

The second iteration was fitted yesterday, and we’re really happy with the results.

We took the learnings from our first two families and started to plan for the next families. It made sense to try and push the boundaries of what we could make, so the team decided to try three types of orthoses we hadn’t made yet.

In June we scanned 4 more families. Out of the 4 we were able to make something for 3 of them.

You’ll notice in the picture she is wearing a different shoe with our GRAFO (the current one is on the left leg), as it allowed a shoe two sizes smaller! Meaning she no longer needs to buy shoes two sizes larger to fit the AFO, but is now able to buy “normal” shoes.

Promise 2: Run a co-create conference

Initially we had expected to run this in the summer but due to the delay we have had to postpone it, so we can fully concentrate on working with the families.

It is our intention to run this conference, and are having discussions with a few universities to run this with them in the near future. We will of course keep you up to date.

So what is next?

This year has definitely been very challenging as we’ve tackled multiple areas from 3D scanning children with complex needs to designing completely new and novel orthoses.

What has become clear is that the need is much greater than we initially realised and that the need for us to be able to scale the Andiamo service is critical. In particular we are going to accelerate our search for a permanent clinic space.

There is no doubt we are going to need significant investment to make this a sustainable service that can impact 100s of millions of people.

Your support getting those first families into our service means the biggest hurdle to this ground up redesign of a crumbling service has already been overcome. The mission to build a service that can deliver a perfect orthosis for every person that needs one within one week of their need is well underway.

You made this possible and the entire Andiamo team thanks you from the bottom of their hearts. This has also been made possible by the families and children working with us and we’re very grateful that they’ve taken the time to help develop their new service.

Finally we want to put into context why our work is so important. Globally around 1 billion people have a disability with about 80% of those unable to afford or access services, this is only likely to increase further over time.

Reading this you’ll have seen the first steps taken by Andiamo to start solving that.