Case Studies

Beirhope Alpacas

The ABCs….and Ds of Success

Alpacas, branding, collaboration……and diversification are the keys to success for a Borders’ based company.

Beirhope Alpacas are a family-owned smallholding located in the stunning Cheviot Hills. They started operating in 2017 with five alpacas and 12 acres of smallholding. Since then, the business has thrived and managed to withstand the COVID-19 crisis.

Recircle Ltd

Background

Every year our planet uses more than 27 million tonnes of natural and synthetic rubber, making more than a billion tyres and more than 50,000 other rubber products that we use every day. Much rubber is simply burned after use and the rest scattered far and wide as a filler in other products. The scale of the waste is vast. However, as demand for rubber grows each year, we continue to plant more rubber trees and use more oil to make more rubber, wasting our planet’s valuable resources, causing deforestation and unnecessary damage around the world.

Scottish Crannog Centre

The Scottish Crannog Centre, located on Loch Tay in Perthshire, includes a museum, the reconstructed crannog (typically a partially or entirely artificial island, usually built-in lakes and estuarine waters of Scotland) and living history area with interactive demonstrations of ancient crafts and technologies from the Early Iron Age. Dr Marco Gilardi, Lecturer, School of Computing, Engineering and Physical Sciences, undertook a feasibility study and design of a new form of interactive, mixed reality, immersive experience to virtually link past dwellers and present visitors.

Group of girls holding sanitary pads in the air

Lilypads

Background

Lilypads Group Ltd is a mission driven company that manufactures and sells reusable sanitary pads and provides menstrual health education. Founder and CEO of Lilypads, Alison Wood, strives to end period poverty and stigma by providing affordable reusable sanitary pads and education to communities around the world, they currently work in Malaysia and Kenya, with preparations to start working in Cambodia and Nigeria.

NjordFrey

NjordFrey was referred to Interface by the Knowledge Transfer Network to find an academic collaborative partner. After scoping up the project and sending it on to various universities within Scotland, Ruth Oliver from Interface matched NjordFrey with four academic institutes for further discussions.

Hypervine Ltd

Following a series of industry scandals that highlighted the need for strong audit trails for building work undertaken, Hypervine was looking for an academic partner to investigate the use of distributed ledger technologies to trace the completion of work in the construction sector and manage compliance events.

Bright Light Relationship Counselling

Interface introduced Bright Light Relationship Counselling to Professor Roberto Rossi from the University of Edinburgh Business School who assigned his students a project to enable Bright Light to counsel and support their clients remotely.

An open suitcase containing old artifacts including a black and white photograph of a man and other documents

Dumfries Museum

Mari Findlay, from Interface, put Siobhán Ratchford, curator at Dumfries Museum, in touch with the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities (SGSAH) Internship/Artist Residency programme, where PhD student Kirsty Kernohan archived, digitised and catalogued a collection of Dr Kissling's possessions, which had been donated to the museum.

A hand holding a mobile device dispaying thermal charts which is replicated on a PC and tablet screen in the background

ThermaFy

Amanda Pickford, from Shock Innovations Ltd, collaborated with Fife College to develop a training module designed specifically at educating heating engineers on how to use thermal cameras. It was crucial that Shock Innovations Ltd could provide their future customers with these new skills and extra knowledge to support the benefits of using their software, ThermaFy.

Blue sign infront of train carriages directing walkers to the station and ferry

Go Upstream

Interface introduced Go Upstream to the OPENspace Research Centre, based at the universities of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt, to evaluate their project of bringing disabled people together with transport staff to explore connections from rail stations to ferry terminals, and then collaboratively design solutions to these challenges.

Group of seven people standing in line infront of medical lingerie

Vanilla Blush

Interface matched medical lingerie business, Vanilla Blush, with the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) to support the development of a new line of underwear for men and women living with a colostomy, ileostomy or a urostomy. In particular, the research looked at support garments during physical activity, to reduce the risk of hernia in people who have a bowel stoma.

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