Bosch · A rental ecosystem for professional-grade DIY

A home renovator needs a professional tool for two days and then owns it for decades. The purchase is a bad deal for the customer and a poor use of a good machine.

Bosch Power Tools asked what happens if the tool is rented instead. The commercial question was straightforward. The hard part is everything around the tool: knowing which one the job needs, getting it there, and getting it back.

Research ran with DIY customers across the DACH region, on real projects rather than in a room. What emerged was that the tool is rarely the first question. The first question is whether the project is achievable at all.

We mapped the journey across five personas, from the first spark of an idea through to the work itself, and wrote the gains and the frictions under every step.

On real projects the doubt arrives before the drill: can this be done at all, by me, this weekend. The tool is a consequence of a plan, and the plan is what people lacked. Answer the project, and the rental follows.

The bet: curated recipes lay a job out end to end, with the tools attached to the steps which need them, rental and delivery inherited from Amazon’s network rather than built beside it, and the return engineered from day one. The customer meets one product, not three vendors.

The defined experience runs from idea to finished work: choose a project, deselect what you already own, receive the box in a delivery window, do the work, and send the tools back to their next job. The garage stays empty, and the project still gets finished.

The DIY recipe platform carries the projects. Rental and delivery run through integration with Amazon’s rental and logistics APIs, so the ecosystem inherits a distribution network rather than building one. A reverse logistics system handles returns, inspection, and the next rental, which is the part most rental propositions leave until it is too late.

The experience was drawn as twelve phases, from the landing page which explains the idea to the review of a finished project, so every screen could be tested against the step which it serves.

One consistent interface holds across browsing, renting, and returning, so the customer meets a single product rather than three vendors. Community features let customers share the projects they finish, which is where the next recipes come from.

Bosch holds the performance data, and it is not ours to publish. The outcome which can be stated is the model itself: a rental ecosystem which puts professional-grade Bosch tools into the hands of occasional users, with the return pathway engineered rather than assumed.

Record. Bosch Power Tools.

Work led by Formist’s founders in prior practice.

Discipline. Service design · commerce platform · logistics integration.

The point. Circular business fails on the way back, not on the way out. The return trip needed the same care as the sale.

Tools out, payment back, and the return which re-rents them: the whole model in one picture, run through Amazon Germany.