Teaming up with a design partner is a bit like entering a marriage. It requires shared values, long-term commitment and good communication. So when that idea for a product that is going to change the world comes to you, there are a few essentials to look for when partnering with someone who will help bring it to life.
Eu-wen Ding had one of these ideas while cycling around Boston in the dark on one of many occasions he had forgotten his lights: why not combine the bike lights with something he never forgets - his helmet? “I thought while I’m at it why don’t I add turn signals and brake lights so all the cars around me can see me too,” he says. This was in 2015 and the start of a $800,000 Kickstarter campaign, which resulted in the Lumos Helmet – a piece of gear that made the 2018 Time’s best inventions list and was included on the annual Oprah’s favourite things.
The first iteration of the helmet, built by Ding himself, was as he puts it: “Fully functional, safe, with lights, turn signals and brake lights but the looks … it didn’t look very good. In fact, it looked really bad.” So he and his small team made the decision to take on a designer, something Ding wishes he had realised sooner.
Ding says it was three things that drew him to reach out to designer Bilal Raja, who he had met years before and recognised he might need his talent one day. First, it was Raja’s eye for aesthetics.
“I appreciate that because it is not a talent that I have. This guy could just see beauty,” says Ding. The second, was Raja’s perfectionism. “He is practical and he understood that if you really want to build a particular product to market it is riddled with compromise, but the compromise is my job, his is to push for perfection,” he says.
Lastly, there was a trust and respect between them that meant they could have the inevitable difficult conversations. “We’re on the same wavelength and relate to each other and trust each other enough to have these conversations constructively and productively, which we still do today,” says Ding.
Alice Whiteley, founder and managing director of pyjama-wear label Yawn, says when choosing her two designers, skill set was important but more so was the potential for a great working relationship. In 2012, she was inspired to ditch her full-time management consultant role to start her own business creating high-quality, colourful pyjamas. She set out researching the market and developing a business plan before approaching designers Philip Koh and Roly Grant whom she admired and had worked with before.
“They understand how to unlock an idea and I really liked the way they intellectually approached a problem,” says Whiteley. “They had a really good sense of who I was and what I was trying to achieve, and they had the creativity to do interesting work. Plus, I knew I could work with them on a long-term basis.”
Whiteley says she was very clear about her expectations of the business with Koh and Grant from the beginning. “I think a lot of partnerships fail pretty quickly under that pressure,” she says. “You can’t expect them to answer all the questions that you really should be answering – who you think the customer is, why they want your products. You have to have a very clear vision that their design brief is meeting.”
Chi-Shuan Ying, AKA DJ QuestionMark, approached a designer with a novel idea: creating a DIY record turntable, now a product known as Spinbox. “My background is in music, so I haven’t touched the design world,” he says. “But I get the idea that designers are powerful, they have the ability to make something real.”
Ying knew what features a turntable had and what it should sound like, but he didn’t know how to bring it to life. After asking around his friends, he came across a product designer he gelled with, Li-Chieh Kao. “It is like dating a new partner, start with having the coffee, and from the conversation you can find out the design sense of this person, that they’re right person you want to work with.”
Ying threw the idea to Kao that he wanted the turntable to be DIY and Kao came back with the idea of creating it out of cardboard. “The feedback he gave me was the design part is kind of easier than making it mass productive,” says Ying. One of his biggest lessons he has learned in choosing someone to work with is making sure that person has good business sense and good communication skills. “He knows if you want to do something, it’s not fine art – you have to think about if they can sell,” he says. And Ying has a word of advice: spend a lot of time at the prototype stage.
As with a great marriage, Ying says it is all about finding someone who is willing to make the commitment with you. “It’s inventing a product and it’s the journey,” he says. “You’re on the same boat so you have to make that commitment that yes, we are going to be on board.”
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