5 Years Of Shipping Iconic Design

In 2017 I started my consulting practice with two goals. First, to help companies move people to action with strategic design that is desirable, differentiated, and iconic. My second goal is to work with my clients to ensure that the work we do together actually goes to market. That second goal is what really sets my practice apart, ensuring my clients have what they need to actually ship the product. 

We can only serve people better product solutions if our ideas make it to market. Which is why I’m proud to celebrate our 5 year anniversary as a studio with these three client product launches from the last few months.

Arc Boat Company. Arc One. It is an honor to work with a company on their first product. When a group of former Space X engineers asked me to design their first electric boat I couldn’t have been more excited. When they said we were going from first sketch to first boat on the water in under a year, I said challenge accepted. A typical sport boat gets about 1 mile per gallon of fuel. Moving to an electric platform eliminates the internal combustion engine, provides more power, reduces noise pollution, and radically simplifies maintenance so boat owners can hop in their boat and go. The Arc One needed to serve as an icon for what an electric boat could be while setting the stage for future Arc products. When the boat was completing its first test, a boater came up to the crew and asked, “is that an electric boat?”, and the client knew we had made the vision a reality.

Arcboats.com

Kirei. Air Baffle With Nike Grind. Over the course of my career I have helped bring hundreds of shoes to market. The average running shoe lasts three to six months. That is why I was so excited to bring my former employer, Nike, together with Kirei, one of my longest running clients, to find a long term home for recycled textiles and leathers from the footwear industry. Kirei makes acoustic architectural wall and ceiling systems from recycled materials in San Diego, California. When we were conceptualizing the next round of product launches I remembered that Nike has been collecting and processing post consumer recycled shoes since 1992. The shoe uppers are ground into a material called “Fluff” that has amazing acoustic properties. By filling a new ceiling mounted baffle with Nike Grind Fluff we were able to develop an architectural ceiling baffle that uses the circular economy to create a higher performance product.

KireiUSA.com

Defender. Foot Defender. Every 30 seconds a limb is amputated due to Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) in the United States alone. Four years ago Dr. Jason Hanft approached me with the desire to reduce that staggering statistic. The few products available that help heal DFUs are difficult to put on properly and have such a visual stigma that they frequently spend more time in the closet than being worn. We spent 4 years working together on a solution that functionally heals wounds, is easy to use, and aesthetically could be worn to work or on errands. The result is the Foot Defender, a product that Dr. Hanft and I presented together at the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) on April 9th in Phoenix to a few hundred doctors and practitioners. I knew we had something game changing, but I did not expect the level of positive response and immediate orders. It was fantastic to design the product, the packaging, the instruction manual, the trade show booth, pitch decks, creative direct the website, and even take the product photography to help Defender tell a single visual story across every possible touchpoint.

Footdefender.com

A huge thank you to all of the clients that have made our first 5 years amazing. Here’s to the next 5 years and beyond! Do you have a project that needs innovation, creativity, and iconic design that gets people’s attention? Contact us to set up a call to discuss if we might be the right fit.

Want to learn a bit more about what we do and how we do it? Read about our process and services.

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