As a business owner, you may be interested in outsourcing your product development to an industrial design company. There are many benefits to contracting this work to a team of successful, knowledgeable, and highly qualified designers, like increased product profitability and improved customer reviews. However, you’ll quickly find that there is no scarcity of industrial designers on the market. Although it may be challenging to sort through your potential collaborators, it’s likely that you’re only interested in onboarding a reputable team that will work with you efficiently. To help with your search, we’ve curated a list of discussion topics to cover during your consultations with these companies to help you recognize when you’re speaking with distinguished and passionate industrial designers who are likely to match your needs versus a less credible company that may not be able to deliver effective results or maybe simply isn’t the correct fit for your vision and needs.
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The design process
If you’re overall still feeling a little hesitant about outsourcing your product development, then discussing the design process itself is definitely worthwhile. Not only will this conversation illuminate very crucial information specifying what you as a business owner should know about this process, but it may also reveal more insight into the company itself. A credible company will have an incredibly thorough process to ensure that they are positioning your product for a high chance of success and profitability by investigating market trends, testing new ideas, using cost-efficient yet high-quality materials, and so on. At Design Stein Studios, we do just that with our six-step development process including market research, ideation, 3D CAD modeling, prototyping, drafting production documents, and mass-producing the finished product. In short, we go through these steps with every project we are handed because we know the entire process is necessary to create products that sell.
Company values
Company values may seem like an unassuming point of discussion to cover with an industrial design team, but in reality, they can potentially signal your compatibility as collaborators. That’s to say, by asking designers what drives their process, you can learn the type of creative approach they like to employ with their designs and decide whether or not that would benefit your product. For example, our team at Design Stein Studios focuses on using our industrial design services to push boundaries. We like to use innovative thinking to rework what already exists and create products that are in a league of their own in terms of aesthetics and functionality, all while maintaining a budget and timeline. On the flip side, other industrial design teams may prioritize other factors, which may not bode well with you or your product if their values don’t align with your vision. It’s important to work alongside a company that shares your standards in order to work seamlessly as a team and develop products you’ll be pleased with.
Intellectual property rights ownership
Understandably, many business owners may feel a little uneasy about outsourcing because of intellectual property rights. However, your products and ideas are solely yours, and a reliable industrial design company will not only assure you that this is the case but also take all the necessary steps to ensure your IP rights are protected through patents and copyrights. During your consultation, asking about this topic is a great way to assess the level of security you can expect from your industrial designers and whether or not you can trust them to handle your property.
Points of collaboration
Even though outsourcing to a third-party firm essentially involves handing over a majority of the product development workload, a reliable and professional industrial design team will never commandeer the entire project. On the contrary, these types of companies value your opinion as the business owner and will frequently keep you updated throughout the process. This is to ensure that you are getting ample opportunity throughout development to make edits to the design and share new ideas. With companies like Design Stein Studios, our mission as industrial designers is to make your vision a reality, and you should never feel like your ideas are being compromised. Suffice to say, inquiring about the level of collaboration you can expect to experience can allow you to gauge the extent of the role you will play throughout the design process.
Hire a reliable product design team
Overall, if you’re looking to outsource your product development to an experienced team of industrial designers, a consultation is a prime opportunity to figure out which team would make a great fit for your business and whether or not their business practice and skills are up to par with your expectations. It may be intimidating sorting through all your potential options, but with plenty of skilled and innovative industrial design companies in California, like us here at Design Stein Studios, you are sure to eventually find the right product developers for you.
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