Home Hardware
Consumer Hardware Designers create home fashion accessories
Innovative storage and hardware products for the home
Summary:
Home hardware designers work in an interesting category, they call it ‘home fashion’, as it seemingly follows trends of style an material from adjacent consumer product categories.
Often a low stakes category in terms of manufacturing sophistication, regulation and capital costs, quality designed hardware can be labor intensive for the hardware designers as they attempt to maintain a timeless appeal, while following trends and exploring exciting new materials, finishes, and geometries.
Responsibilities:
Design Research
Hardware designers can help to gather insight through competitive marketplace analysis, access to qualitative studies, ethnography, trend shopping, visiting trade shows, talking to retailers and retail customers and consulting with CMF and trend experts.
Design Strategy
Defining what success looks like can be done by establishing target market segments and mapping retail channel opportunities, keeping time pressures and supply chain constraints in the forefront.
Design Execution
Hardware designers are skilled in concept sketching, 3D CAD modelling, photo-real rendering, presenting, justifying design decisions, creating qualitative frameworks, testing models and prepping assets and resources for manufacturing.
Gallery:
Experienced home hardware designers follow the same product design and development process to effectively meet the needs of the customer and adapt to changes in marketing and business objectives, Principal Design’s 5 step process is a framework that guides the design team and encourages communication and world-class results.
OUR PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS
The success of our product design process employed by our experienced home hardware designers depends our purposeful, user-centered design approach. Organized into the five stages most proven to leverage our design efforts, Principal Design’s purpose-driven frameworks are chosen to reduce risk while balancing exploration and execution. Our creative strategy is divergent to leverage creativity, and convergent to preserve resources. Each stage of the process is an opportunity to reflect and make refinements to the project that are specific to the present design challenges.