Design Your Product to Sell: Gym Equipment - Row Machine
Here’s a post from one of our new senior VT members Michael Trovato
Overview: Valence Tek offers a unique approach to product design that ensures your finished product lands in the right market, with the best chance of success. Our proprietary Gate Procedure ensures you get consumer feedback, marketing potential and multiple concept designs before the design starts. That’s how we standout among less interesting design houses!
Keep your heads up engineers! The more you know about marketing and “The Voice of the Customer”, the better your final design will be!
Our Successful Product Development Approach Sean’s Story
Valence Tek has a long successful track record of developing products for a myriad of customer types. Sometimes we interface with large companies that have an established industrial design paradigm and portfolio. The design requirements are often set in stone and require our exact attendance. Other times, we interface with those garage inventors that know their product could be a success but do not know how to start the process. This is a story about the latter.
The Discovery Phase
A few years ago, we interfaced with a gentleman who had a great concept for a new piece of gym equipment. Let’s call him Sean, for the sake of the story. Sean loved to workout and it showed. We were fast friends. Valence Tek’s partners have an eye on fitness at all times. The mind and the body are not so easily separated and when you take care of the body, the mind follows. Sean had a sketch on the back of a napkin but that’s as far as he could go. He had a budget in mind and wanted to develop a concept of his machine.
House of Quality
As always, we like to set the tone with some House of Quality questions. HoQ is a method of ensuring the product is designed for the end customer in mind and that the deliverables are agreed upon and live on a checklist document. This is a great practice not only in mechanical design, but also in everyday life. Setting a goal and listing quantifiable results are the best way to ensure incremental success.
Establishing the Design Goal
After a short discovery call, we got some key markers. First, who did Sean want to sell this to? Turns out, Sean had some contacts in the gym equipment industry and wanted to pitch this idea to them. This was great information as it solidified what Sean expected his final deliverables to be. The model would serve as presentation material. It would be used to engage the end client via beautiful renderings and various possible configurations. It is important to know the difference in designing.
A designer can design a superficial model that can be used to explain function or the designer can make detailed manufacturable models and assemblies that can be shopped out to vendors. The former being much simpler and more cost effective for Sean, plus it was exactly what he needed. The latter would have been a much longer development cycle and cost much more.
Often engineering teams or designers do not open with these questions. They assume that the initial design should be just like the final product. This is an error that can cost you big if you’re designing so be sure to establish your ultimate goal upfront.
Valence Tek Stage Gates Approach
Over the next few weeks, Valence Tek and Sean met regularly as we passed through the Valence Tek Gating Procedure. We involved Sean in high level weekly design review meetings to ensure he understood where the design stood and final release date.
We went through many changes: material changes, pin weights versus free weights, handle position for grip, etc. Sean was ecstatic that his dream was coming true. That’s where we really shine. We create those hard to define dreams.
Successful Product Release
A few iterations later, we had final models. Valence Tek then created a series of lifelike renderings that Sean used in his presentations along with some videos showing the machine movement. A year later, during our scheduled customer retrospectives, we learned that Sean had presented his idea to a few companies and one of them bought the rights to his machine. Success! We could not be prouder of the Valence Tek procedures and team for making this dream a reality. We apply the same principles to all our product design approaches. Not just for our customers but internally as well. We have to know who our product is for, how much it will sell for, and when we recoup our investment (ROI). If your engineering group is not asking those questions up front, you may miss the mark entirely.
