In the previous article (the first in this series on physical product design), I wrote about understanding the context around your product—establishing the “who, what, where, when, why?” of how it will exist in the physical world with great detail. This isn’t an exercise to do once for posterity; context is something which needs to be kept top of mind throughout the process of bringing a product to market. You’ll only collect more of it as things progress.
Here, I’ll talk about how to apply context to design Your Thing in three dimensions. As I’ve established previously, I won’t be covering formula development because it’s simply too much to information for a single article. Let’s focus on things which are solid: packaging, tools, objects, etc.
I always try to create novelty in My Things. While I want the product to be able to live seamlessly in context, it’s even better if it has something about it that makes a viewer do a double-take. Most of this is in service of basic “good branding”—have a clear, memorable visual identity that strands out amongst competitors. Part of it is pure Disney—how can this thing feel magical? And the last part of it is, I guess, still pure Disney—how can this thing perform with our target demo across digital media channels? Novelty is baked-in marketing.
Products which are all novelty and no substance are essentially toys, and cause me great pain. Products which have at least as much reason to exist as they do novelty are in perfect harmony, and set up for success in our current state of social marketing. An example of a brand which strikes that balance between novelty and utility is Starface, a millennial/gen z acne line built around its hero product: zit-sized hydrocolloid bandages in the shape of colorful stars. Instead of exposing your naked zit to the world, or caking it with concealer, you can put a cute, protective star on it and feel that angsty acne shame disappear. (Selfies ensued.)
Novelty and customization go hand-in-hand, but customization and your money are fully in bed together. It’s incredibly expensive to make a custom physical object at scale, let alone as a one-off. (I’ve seen $8k spent on having a comp house make a single lip balm tube for a photoshoot.) The good news is that customization is a spectrum, and there are plenty of ways to create novelty through design while being strategic with resources.
In researching this article, I’ve asked my colleague, Aaron Saxton, the industrial designer I worked with to create Theraplush, for advice on resourcing to create a custom mass-produced product: costs, timelines, project management, options, and other info I wish somebody wrote down for me eight years ago.