Understand manufacture and build a product for a profit

Understanding manufacturing is the key to profit.

When you’re developing a new product, there are (what feels like) a million different interrelated decisions that you must make in order to come up with the right solution for your specific context and objectives. Every detail must be carefully considered and tested if you are to arrive at something unique, original, and worthy of a customer’s time and attention.

Two big decisions stand out though – namely the material of choice and the manufacturing process you’re going to use. These two decisions are foundational to the future of your product and they have significant knock-on effects for everything else along the way. As a result, they shouldn’t just be considered in isolation. Your mindset needs to encompass everything that is going to be required to bring that product to life, and the material and manufacturing process needs to reflect that.

This is where working with a product development team can be so useful. We don’t pretend to know all the intricacies of each individual polymer or the minute details of a highly specific manufacturing process. That’s where we’ll lean on your expertise. Instead, we will bring a more holistic perspective to the product development process, ensuring that your dream product can be created sustainably and profitably over the long term.

By combining insights about which materials are good for which use cases, how these materials react in complex environments, manufacturing best practices, and more – we can provide a fresh set of eyes to analyze the product and help with designing the best way forward for manufacturing that item, taking all constraints and challenges into account.

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Where Does the Product Development Process Start?

Typically, our first point of call is to discuss all the different considerations that are running through your mind that will influence the material and production choices. We want to understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve so that we can align our objectives strategically before we get started.

These early conversations are critical so that we can work to ensure that your product can unlock the potential that you envision without compromising on the substance of what you’re trying to create. This can be a very clarifying process that helps you to be robust and comprehensive in your thought process. As we’ll discuss in the rest of this article, product development is about managing a complex and nuanced set of considerations that are all interrelated and dependent on one another.

This is not to say that we have to have everything figured out in the beginning because in most cases we need to play with different materials and finishes to test our assumptions and configurations. But having a north star to aim towards helps to guide us into the right conversations so that we can find the best balance between fit, function, and aesthetics at each stage of the product’s life.

From there, we can start with prototyping.

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From Prototyping to Mass Production

Once we have a clear understanding of what we’re trying to achieve, we’ll move into an aggressive prototyping phase where we aim to test assumptions and iterate on what we discover along the way. We are very tolerant of failure in this stage because we are still experimenting with different options and every time we get something wrong it gives us crucial information for avoiding those failure modes moving forward.

The decisions we make in this prototyping phase are often quite different from what we might suggest for mass production because we are optimizing for speed, cost, and information about the product design challenges. You shouldn’t look for perfection here, but rather a good-enough solution that can help to test a specific assumption. By embracing this mindset during prototyping, we can drastically reduce the time it takes us to get feedback, and we can pivot much more effectively before we’ve invested huge amounts of time and money.

As an example, say you were designing a new type of plastic handheld hair trimmer. The vision of the product is for it to be mass-produced and made from injection moulds. However, before you get there, you need to design how the product is going to fit into a user’s hand, where the buttons are going to be, and how the weight is going to be distributed. It wouldn’t make sense to rush headfirst into injection moulding at this stage because you’re still trying to figure out what the product is going to be. A more effective way to move forward would be to make some basic prototypes with a 3D printer which can allow us to test lots of different options for a relatively low cost and time investment.

Each iteration in the prototyping process just needs to tackle one specific goal at a time, maximizing the amount of information gathered and allowing for a small decision to be made. By stacking these up on each other with quick-fire testing, we can narrow down the specific decisions and insights that we’ll carry forward into the mass production phase.

It’s important to clarify this so that your material and manufacturing process choices are optimized for the right things, based on real information that you’ve obtained from real-world testing. We often have to help our clients work through this process because the temptation is to move forward as quickly as possible without doing the requisite testing along the way. Skipping this prototyping can lead to a situation where small flaws in the design are magnified during mass production and you can end up back at square one before you know it.

But assuming you get the prototyping right, then choosing a suitable material and manufacturing process becomes just that much easier. The mass production phase will bring its own challenges, of course, but by having the design dialled in you should be able to handle those from a production standpoint.

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The Value of a Dedicated Product Development Team

As industrial designers, we’ve seen this process hundreds of times before and that’s how we try and add value to our clients. When you work with a product development team like ours, you can leverage all the experience that we’ve accumulated so that you don’t have to repeat mistakes that others have made. We want to see you succeed and will do everything we can to help you make efficient and effective choices along the way.

Finding the balance between resources, customer demand, material availability, funding, and market accessibility is not something to be taken lightly, but If you work through these considerations systematically and apply the right mental models, you can greatly increase your chances of success. And your product development team is there to guide you through that journey from prototypes to low-volume runs, and eventually to mass-produced runs. We see ourselves as co-collaborators – bringing hard-fought expertise and a fresh perspective to the table.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not just about selecting the right material and manufacturing process. It’s about curating an entire product journey that delivers on the objectives across every aspect of the process, including creating a sustainable and profitable way forward for whatever you’re bringing into the world.

We’re here to help. So if you’d like to explore what this might look like for your product, be sure to get in touch with us today.

We can’t wait to hear from you.

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