Six Years Of Collaboration!

The six year anniversary of my independent consulting practice was in April. We’ve been so busy having fun working with clients that I haven’t been able to put together my annual post about it until this week! I like writing these because they give me a chance to reflect on the year gone by and think forward to the year ahead. 

Here are a few moments from the last year that I am particularly proud of:

Biltwell.

Working in the motorcycle accessory and equipment category is as fun as it is challenging. Users in this category are very passionate and serious about their love of riding. I’ve been collaborating with Biltwell Inc for some years now. It is great to see a couple of motorcycle helmet projects we have done together break the light of day and be so well received. Biltwell has been making the iconic Gringo helmet for years. Their brief to me was to add more functional venting to make it a better experience and to do it in a way that was iconic and made the helmet immediately recognizable as a Biltwell. The immediate reaction on social media blew me away with people clamoring to get theirs. To me this is design at its best when a very particular set of end users immediately falls in love.

Buy the Gringo SV now

Defender.

I’ve been working with Defender Operations across product, packaging, brand strategy and creative direction for about 5 years, just a little longer than Biltwell. Last year we shipped the Foot Defender, the best protective boot designed specifically to heal diabetic foot wounds. Last month the next product we designed together went public, the Cloud 9. For the Cloud 9 we took everything we learned with the Foot Defender in terms of making an amazing comfortable product that absorbs and disperses pressure from under the foot and put it in an easy to wear clog. This product is great for someone with diabetic foot wounds that have recently healed… but it’s also just a great house shoe to work from home in or run a quick errand. That’s me in the photo modeling a sample. Contributions included industrial design, packaging, product naming, branding, and photography. The Cloud 9 isn’t available just yet but you can learn a little more about it on the Foot Defender website.

Read more about the Cloud 9

See the interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Kirei.

In May the seventh product launch I collaborated with Kirei on was released, the Tesselate Collection. Kirei was acquired by Carnegie last year and this collection was featured heavily at NeoCon in June in both the Carnegie showroom and the Metropolis Sustainability Lab. The team at Carnegie invited me to come out to NeoCon to help with press outreach and talk to interior designers and architects about the collection. It was fantastic to see designers walking up to the installed products and touching, interacting, and just all around loving them! To see that first hand was a real treat. I was so happy to be able to talk about the inspiration and process of working with the incredibly talented team at Kirei in this interview for Design Milk.

Read the article in Design Milk

Learn more about the collection

Glue.

Over the past 12 months I’ve been doing more consulting in footwear. I love working in almost every product category but footwear always connects with the kid in me who just wanted some cool kicks. In July Advanced Design put on their first annual Glue footwear design conference in Portland, Oregon, the hub of US performance footwear design. I gave the kickoff keynote presentation and talked about the year the Air Jordan 1 came out and its influence on my 5th grade brain, as well as the 1991 Nike Huarache which is the reason I got my first job. I described how I went from not being able to afford cool sneakers, to drawing them, to working at Nike in a 10 year span from 1993 to 2003. It was an amazing conference filled with talks from friends and former co-workers like Ashley Commeaux, VP design at Allbirds, Gemo Wong, former head of special projects at Brand Jordan, and Aaron Powers, designer at Cole Haan. It is always wonderful to be a part of bringing the design community together.

Read the core77 article

See more highlights on IG

Next year.

That brings me to my thoughts for the year ahead. All of the projects above are about helping people, bringing communities together, and making things that people love. I’m fortunate I get to collaborate with so many organizations who want to do just that. My goal for next year is to do less but better. To really focus on working with people who want to make a positive change and make things that truly connect with people on a deep level. If that is something your organization wants to do I’d love to chat!