For businesses that design or want to design their own products…
Do you want to build a more profitable business? Here’s how!
- Make Design a key strategic element of your business
- Develop your design processes and strategies
Makersmith help you develop your design processes so that creativity and fresh thinking can deliver new and better products from inception to final production.
Flexible
Our input can be as much as you need, from a short discussion to resolve a specific problem to a full business review to set you on course for effective and strategic product development.
Expert
We are really good at understanding how design currently fits into your business and then leading you forward with support, training and a clear design strategy.
Experienced
You get an enthusiastic, creative, and innovative service built on a combined 40 years of design, management and manufacturing experience. Just some of the areas we can help you with include:
- Implementation of Design Thinking strategies
- Strategic integration of design with all business activities
- Building collaborative design through training and systems
- Making continuous improvement part of your design process
- Training in the use of creativity and idea generation tools
- Setting up robust design systems
- Selection and implementation of design hardware and software
How creative are you? Not very? – Welcome to the Design Team…
Design thinking can engage your design team with your marketplace, generate new streams of creativity and new profitable products.
Generating new product ideas doesn’t need to rely on a flash of inspiration – although that’s great; ideas can come out of a structured process that provides a liberating framework for creativity.
There are two core building blocks to this process:
- Defining the actual problem that you are trying to solve, not what you think it is – or what you are told it is.
- Creating a solution for each part of the problem and building these back up into an integrated whole solution.
The process is like this:
- Understand your client's needs and problems
- What are they really trying to achieve
- Completely define your client's problem
- Verify the definition with them
- Generate ideas to address every part of the problem using creativity techniques
- Recombine these ideas into possible solutions and evaluate theoretically & with prototypes
- test your preferred solutions with clients and end users
- Implement the preferred solution
You can also revisit each of the process steps at any time to modify or improve the design.
The great thing about this approach is that the process framework allows designers to be more creative and generate more solutions and ultimately reach a customer satisfying solution.
Lose an employee – lose your business…
How much of your design intellectual property is in someone’s head?
It’s very easy to rely on your design team to remember how to design and make your products.
“Ah well, we’ve always done it that way, the drawing isn’t quite right because we just put that little bit extra in there…” “I’ve worked here for 10 years, I know just how it goes together…”
Sounds familiar? It’s often all too common in all sorts of businesses – and it works – until someone isn’t there anymore.
At best you have a short term problem getting someone else up to speed with what needs to be done, at worst you have permanently lost valuable knowledge about your products and processes.
The less time it takes to bring new staff up to speed, or to bring in temporary contract staff, the less the negative impact on your business.
Makersmith can help you capture your designs and processes so that your business is resilient and you can remain productive even when the unexpected happens.
Every business is different, so we fully engage with your business, understand the issues and put systems in place to capture historic IP. We then help you to put design at the centre of your business and ensure that future IP is also secure.
"Gareth’s depth of knowledge and expertise in product development and 3D modelling, gave us the opportunity to take 2D sketched ideas through progressive stages of 3D CAD modelling. In so doing, we avoided numerous financial costs and unnecessary delays in launching our range of tapware. …. Gareth’s ability to understand our challenges and communicate his ideas clearly made the whole process much easier than we expected."
Lee Hunwicks, founder of The Cast Iron Bath Company