EPISODE 16 - GABE PRERO

Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.

In this episode we speak with the Vice President of Product Development at Artica Collective, a company responsible for product brands like Slumberpod, Colugo, EverSprout, and Doctor's Choice.

Our guest brings a wealth of knowledge in the world of product design and development with over 16 years of experience in various industries, including consumer goods, fishing and outdoors, furniture, packaging, office supplies, medical supplies, home storage and organization, juvenile products, and home decor. Outside of his professional life he enjoys fixing things, making things better, and has recently become addicted to completing escape rooms with a group of friends. 

Gabe Prero hails from Chicago, where he still resides with his wife of 18 years, their four children, and a yellow lab. He earned his BFA in Industrial Design from the University of Illinois Chicago. Known for his technical design skills, problem solving abilities, and expertise in design for manufacturing (DFM), Gabe has successfully brought dozens of products to market and holds over 20 patents.

In the episode we discuss the development of a modular closet organization system called Closets by Liberty from Liberty Hardware. We explore the challenges faced in creating this easy-to-install system, the importance of addressing customer concerns, and the critical role of research and prototyping.

Gabe shares insights into the involvement of a dedicated team, the trends in product development, and his advice for those aspiring to make a significant impact in the industry. In a world where bringing a product to market is a massive and complicated endeavor Gabe does a wonderful job of breaking the process down into a collection of entertaining stories.

Show Notes:

To learn more about Artica Collective, visit articacollective.com

Tor learn more about Artica Inc., visit artica.com

To learn more about Gabe’s work, visit prero.com

Podcast Transcript:

Podcast Recording - Gabe Prero

Hey Gabe, welcome to the show.

Hey, Troy, thanks for having me.

Appreciate you being here. So I tell everybody when we start this that I started in almost 26 years ago, believe it or not, I kind of saw the writing on the wall that I was, you know, I was working for a company that had all facets of product development under 1 roof, industrial design, engineering , prototyping , RTV injecction molding, you know, that kind of thing. And I tell everybody I got my master's degree working there in product development and then kind of saw the writing on the wall that they were not going to be in it for the long haul and long story short spun off and started impulse and we have been helping people design product since. So that is a little brief intro into how I got into product development , how did you get into product develop?

So I would say it really starts when I was about 12 years old or so, I had 1 of those really old school alarm clocks, like the wood paneling and all that, and there would be a button that you would hold to like time set and then you would press the minute button over and over and over again and I remember always like going 1 min over what the time was and then having to go through the whole thing again, I am like, All right, that is it when I grow up I am going to make stuff better. And that was really like the mindset that started me on to I wanted to get into something related to what I thought was engineering at the time. My dad was always a duet yourselfer. He fixed a lot of stuff around the house. I would spend my weekends following him around and. Like, you know, I would ask him, how does this work? And he would tell me exactly how it works from beginning to end, so I kind of got that built into my system and wanting to tinker make stuff build stuff. And then I learned about industrial design when I was maybe 14 years old or something like that in high school, a buddy of mine told me about it and he showed me the I do video of the shopping cart video, the, you know, the super for Famous, it was a Dateline or Nightline or whatever. And and I am like, that is it that is what I want to do. I was in Chicago, I found out that University of Illinois should Chicago had a program and so ever since I was in high school, like, I knew where I wanted to go, what I wanted to end up doing. And yeah, so so I was I did industrial design for a whole bunch of years on individual contribution level and then they worked into design management to now product development leadership.

Awesome, awesome. So tell us about the kinds of products you have developed over the years and then lead us into the product you want to talk about today?

Sure. So I I started my career in in 28 right before the recession then. So I but because of that, I have unfortunately had to bounce around a lot as companies grew and shrink and grew and shrink and but it is given me a lot of vast experience throughout that. So I started off working at a brands under swing lines, so I worked on staplers, hole punchers, home office tools I worked at Tri Corp bra on. Bottles and rigid packaging bottles and closures. So got a lot of in with injection molding and 2 stage moulding, single stage blow molding, stuff like that. That was my first first 4 really into 3D printing as well worked in home decor, tabletop, ceramics, furniture. And lighting and candle accessories when I was a tag, which was, you know, very, very new for me coming from the design world, this was a different way of thinking of product. It was like mostly small run handmade product, but but super interesting process as well. Went I worked on plastic storage and home organization products at home Products International as well as garment care items like iron boards and hampers, sorters, drawing racks. I have done some consulting where I have done some products in the pet industries, some some baby products. I have done some medical devices, medical products, I also started a fishing lure company which ultimately led to a role at at Catch Go, where I headed up the design team then and then and then product development , working on fishing tackle, rods, lures, reels, stuff like that. And right before the that I was at Liberty Hardware where I worked on a closet organization system, which is the product that I will I will talk about in a second and and also decorative hardware, decorative home hardware function, functional home hardware and shower doors, and currently where I am at now, which is ARTICA Collective, where I oversee Product development for all of their collection of brands including Slumber Pod, Kalu Evers, Sprout and Dr. So. So those those vary in category. We have 2 brands that are in the juvenile product industry, 1 in home gar in another in medical and medical adjacent kind of aging at home kind of products as well as socks, compression stockings and recovery products. And yeah, so the the product I wanted to talk about was really what I worked on for most of my time when I was at Liberty Hardware, which is the cloud assets by Liberty System, a fully customized , modular based system for a closet organization .

Interesting. That is quite the breadth of experience. Let me just say that, but tell us more about the C. Is it organizer or?

So so think of like, you know, the container store has their alpha system kind of like the wall standards and the brackets, but you also know the alpha system is not quite that attractive and it is kind of clunky and certainly can be difficult to install. Especially if you are not a DI wire and you are a little bit hesitant about how do I find a stud, did I hit the stud? Is it going to come crashing off my wall later? Is the whole thing going to rake back and forth? So we at Liberty, we were doing a lot of intense research into home organization in general and 1 of our major retailers came to us with an opportunity to say, look, this is a category that certainly needs some bolstering and the products that they were currently offering were not anything. Particularly special. They were all things that had been done before in just different ways and different skins. And they said if you can really innovate this, you know, where you are a vendor that we like to work with, we were 1 of their top suppliers in the categories that we worked with Liberty. So they wanted to see if we could take on this category and really to find something new for it and to find something different, different, and from out our intense research, we found a tremendous amount of shortcomings within. Closet systems, you know, yeah, you could go California because closets and you can spend, you know, $8,000 on a fully customized wood system, a it is expensive, but it is fully custom, it takes time and if you want to change it around, you are left with limited options for modularity and certainly if you move that system is not moving with you at staying in place to try to do 1 of those yourself, like, you know, a system that you will find at 1 of the big box retailers like Home Depot or lows. It takes a fair bit of handiwork to put 1 of those together and and really feel that you did it reliably well. And we were looking to solve those problems and bring a really a aesthetically pleasing system, super modular, super customizable , easy to move, easy to install and reliable system to someone who was even a novice at at at building or creating or things like that, that would not need a lot of tools and that would really solve a myriad of industry issues that there were to closet organization systems.

So you mentioned the your client said, hey, if you can innovate on this, you know, we would love to have you do it. What kind of innovations were involved in the in the actual end result?

So, um, some of the big ones that we we focused on was a the installation process. So that is 1 where, you know, no 1 likes installing things to their wall, but you kind of need to you certainly need to from a safety perspective and we have all seen, you know, the follow up that IKEA had over anti tip stuff in their dressers and we start certainly needed to avoid that. But even beyond that, you know, that is maybe 1 or 2 screws into the wall, but a lot of these systems have to fully mount. So you are you are talking about a cleat or or a rail? You got to hit multiple studs and then you are dealing with hundreds and hundreds of pounds that are relying on your handiwork on your wall and that could be anything from a, you know, inconvenience that ends up lasting a whole weekend that it takes to fix or. You know, God forbid that could be something bad where a kid is in the closet and the system, you know, falls on them or something like that. So there were a lot of hesitancies in the market around like, the barrier to entry of just wrapping your head around the project that is redoing a closet was huge. And it took so much for customers to say like, all right, I am willing to take this on because they knew that going into it, it is going to be a multi multiple weekend project. It is going to take hours to do it is going to take a couple people, it is going to take tools that they might not own or expertise they might not have. So we really, really wanted to at first, we sought out to make a tool free system, something that you could fully assemble without a single tool. We wanted something that was floor based, so it would have to mount to the wall, obviously for anti tip purposes, but we wanted to bulk of the structure of the weight to just have to sit on the floor, so you do not really have to worry about. All that weight relying on your handiwork, you can rely on the contractor who built your house as handiwork and leave it to them. And then on top of that, we wanted the anti tip part. To not be an afterthought . And as you see with most products, if you buy a dresser, you will get a little nylon. You know, tether that is got to be drilled in afterwards, which I would venture to say 15 % of people actually do if that. Most people probably still have that sitting in their drawer on the top drawer from that from that closet, so from that.

Yeah, wondering what it is.

Exactly. So we wanted to make sure that as part of the process of putting together, this anti tip had to be installed and you really did not have a way around it unless you did something like to alter the system. So that was something that we wanted to overcome as well and we wanted universal modularity for most of these systems, yeah, you can change a shelf easily, but when you put in a drawer, and if you have ever installed a draw with Dr. Glides, you know what a bear of a chore that is to do. We wanted to be able to simplify that, so if you wanted to move a drawer from place to place you, you could do so easily so that your class system could migrate with you over time, and if you decided, hey, you know, I need a lot of hanging space, so I want just rods in this whole closet system. Double stacked all the way, you know, with with you could do that. And then if later you want more cells, but you want the closet rods at a lower height. Maybe it is for a little kids closet, you could do that as a kid ages, maybe now you need more drawers and that that hanging height can move up a little bit and some of those shelves can move down. You can do that as well if it is, you know, I see if my daughter her collection shoes are growing now now that her feet have stopped growing so. We need to introduce a little bit more and that takes a special kind of storage within a closet system as well. So I want her closet to be able to morph and grow with that and certainly as we move from place to place, I want this to be able to come with us and change to a new closet, so if I have a 10 ft closet and I am moving to an Afro closet, but it is now a walk in. Can I now separate parts of the system and use it in different areas? So these were all core parts that we wanted to take into consideration that we actually were able to tackle with this system.

Very cool. So with all the products that we have helped design, I mean it is been thousands, literally every 1 of those journeys is at least a little bit different, walk us through the journey of developing this closet system. What are all the all the steps involved?

Yeah, it was a big 1. I will say liberty. Well, 1 of the great things about my time in Liberty was we were very research centric company and every stage we did intense research. So when we first started the process around general home organization , we held a 2 to 3 day. Brainstorm where it was our design team as well as a lot of our marketing team, sales team, other other disciplines about the company, but we also brought in industry experts. So we had professional organizers come in, we had contractors come in people who did custom closets or things like that to talk about the idea of storage in general. And we spent, I would say a day on different functions, so whether that was closet storage in a bedroom, whether that was kitchen pantry storage, whether that was mudroom storage or laundry room storage, and we generated. Lots of ideas around those. And what could a system be was the system, you know, was it a hanging system? Was it a stackable system? Was it a system that grew sideways or modular in that way? And then we went to research with the those different systems, so we made some refined concepts on here is some categories of where these systems can go, and we wanted to see why customers responded and almost more importantly, what were their concerns with each 1 of those because obviously they are going to going to favor 1, but we need to address their concerns of those issues as well. So coming out of that, we went into more more specific concept ideation brainstorming around what is the structure of the system and, you know, was in a wood panel based system, is it a framework based system, is it is it something like connects or Legos or things like that where it is small modular pieces that build together to make a thumb greater than the parts. So we did a lot of exploration and chunking down of ideas to those, and then again, prototyping and other rounds of research where now we have customers that were starting to interact with those rough prototypes. That we made to see where their preferences are falling until we ended up on, I would say 2 or 3 very solid directions where we got more professionally made, looks like works like prototypes of the general system system, so it did not have all of the technical details worked out. But it was a good representation of the idea and how we wanted to execute on that. And then once we had a winner in that category from the company consumer testing, we went into the really deep phase of design and engineering for all of those components . So we ended up with a framework that was based off of aluminum extrusions and we wanted these to be a universal so that there is no front, there is no back, there is no top, there is no bottom, you, you really can not get it wrong. When you are putting the thing together, you know, the units that used to stabilize the system from side to side, the top 1 and the bottom 1 are the same, there is, you know, you really can not get those things wrong. We wanted the brackets that hold your shelves and drawers to really be interchangeable , you can put them In any at any interval throughout the system. So it was working out all these details of the challenges of how do we make it tool free, that it is still easy to assemble that you can do the whole thing in 45 min to an hour that it is, you know, the whole. The whole building, the whole thing and fitting out your closet will be like a Saturday project and not a multiple weekend project. So that was a very deep engineering phase. I spent a lot of time flying back and forth between our design studio in Chicago, working with our engineering team in Winston Salem, North Carolina. And and, you know, prototyping , building, rep prototyping , rebuilding, redesigning a lot of that over and over until we got to a point where we felt, okay, we can prototype stuff and we can do real customer research now with assembly, so we had better prototyped parts. You know, vendor made parts or we had castings that were made more robust 3D prints, things like that to work out all the particulars of the system, and then we had users start to build the system and how do they interact with it, how do they move parts around? Again, more rounds of research and then it came into all right, we have got the concept, we have got the engineering , we are and refining it for cost. We are finding it for for design, for manufacturing . But at the same time, if this is going to be in a big box like a home depot, what is the shop ability, I am sure and throughout your career, you have seen lots of modular concepts, but if the customer does not get it right away, you are stuck, you are not going to be able to move a single unit and we needed to be able to show, okay, this is how all of these individual things naturally lend into this this bigger picture. And and you know kind of how the colors make the portrait. And so we did a tremendous amount on the packaging side on the signed side of the aisle shop side explorations on that, the research with that and prototyping of that we had customers doing, you know, in ale shop ability saying, okay, this is what I want to make. This is I would put it together, we did the same thing with online configurations so that user we were seeing how long it would take a user to go through the the process to shop the system online and build what they wanted. And ultimately to get us to the point where we could do, you know, alpha run production and and product launch.

That is amazing. I mean, that is a massive undertaking at least it sounds like.

It was it was huge. It was probably the longest the longest project of my career, the most thorough project that that I have been a part of.

What was the time like.

Okay. Very initial category exploration, which happened right around when I started Liberty until we were at that first or alpha run pre production. So it is probably about 2 and a half years in total.

Wow, tell us about the team, like how many people are involved in the development and what were their roles?

So that was a that was a pretty small team. I think it was a core of 5 or 6 people. We had our our marketing marketing head lead that was head of like new category development who is focus on on this project. So he was essentially the team lead. We had a marketing manager that was focusing on the the marketing side. There is myself as the design lead. We had an engineering lead, a graphic design lead. We had a PMO dedicated to the project as well. And then we had 1 person dedicated as like a design secondary is backup when my main go to. When I needed support on on that end and then there were a few times that I pulled in the balance of our design studio for different brainstorm sessions or to bouncing up back and forth, engineering would do the same thing with the rest of the engineering group, but really, yeah, I was a core group of 5 people from from different different backgrounds throughout the company and who were all very comfortable working in an uncomfortable project where it was a new category for all of us, a new space for all of us, and we were trying to do something new with. It really dynamic team. 1 of the most favorite teams I have honestly had working on in my career, a lot of really a lot of strong personalities that would but heads in a good way and and I think we came out with some great ideas.

Cool. So the you mentioned like a lot of milestones that you kind of hit through the process, but was there anything like that stood out as a huge achievement that the team reached during the development ?

Yeah. I mean, there were there were a couple of big ones really working out. The there were 2 big functional aspects to figure out which which were hugely satisfying 1 was how do we build anti tip into something that you got to do and so, you know, a cool part of and also in a way that it was natural to do it, so you are not starting off with marking your studs on your walls, you can essentially build the unit where you want it and then mounted to a wall and know that you do not have any issues. So we you know, we had this modular framework that was essentially, you know, 4 pieces made up a rectangular frame and those would be your your inner rules of the closet, so those would be parallel to each other, and then we had components that would bridge those from side to side. So those are called our stabilizer bars and those stabilizer bars were attached from frame to frame and we we built in the anti tips to those stabilizer bars. So when you put in your you stabilize the system, you already have anti tip RA rockets that are there that are ready to go to the wall and that lock in place, we call it a drop and lock system. So you have these platform plastic components that would slide up over and down in 1 " intervals and there were 2 of them on each 1 of these 24 " long stabilizer bars, so so. You are guaranteed throughout that span that you are going to hit at least 1 stud if not 2, and your second will be, you know, can be bound to the wall with a wall anch but once you put that up as part of the system. It is already there, it is already in place, you find your stud, you just slide the thing over and and drill it in. And on top of that, this drop in lock system also allowed it to not just be anti tipped to pull away but prevented the system from rak back and forth at the same time. So really to achieve the full stabilization of the unit, you are not going to feel it until those 2 screws are in so but those 2 screws do not have to be in until. The last 10 % of the assembly process so you can build out your closet, figure out where you want it, where you want to put things, and then, all right, put your 2 screws, now you are locked into place, put in all your accessories , like your drawers and your and yourselves. So that that was a big 1, I think the other big 1 from a functional standpoint was our universal brackets. So our shelving brackets, we had these notches that were hidden into the rails of this system. They were hidden because. Otherwise, they are pretty ugly. If you look at a typical metal wall standard, not the most attractive thing out there. We did want something that was a little bit more aesthetically pleasing. And so and these channels also doubled as a place where we had these plastic snaps that could pop into that channel for different accessories . And this was more future thinking if we wanted to add. A track or a belt rack or a hook rail that went from front to back and slid out, it could snap into these snide side rails, but we also used it for the stabilizer bar. So as you are putting them into place, they will hold themselves in place and they will hold your system together. You know, before it is loaded up what you are trying to put everything in place so that it is so you do not need the second person to hold it for you, but on top of that, we had these slots that I think it was 4 " intervals and to make a bracket system that would work with both both a drawer glide that we had a bracket that had DR lines on it and a bracket into the shelving, and they all interface with the same slots so you can have a shelf. And 30 s, 30 s later, you have a drawer in the same location, and if you put the whole thing together, you realize ****, that drawer is 4 " too high, it takes you 30 s, you move it down. And nothing has to be unscrewed or res screwed together. And it is still just as stable and rock solid as before. So the the stability is coming from everything else the drawer then just fits into that now perfectly squared out system and will will function with soft clothes. And all of that. So from a functional standpoint, those were the biggest ones, I would say from a surprise standpoint, the biggest hurdle we had is we had spent probably a good year and a half of development . On something that was fully tools, so you could put this whole thing together with SNAP together parts and took a tremendous amount of engineering the creativity to figure all this out to deal with these massive loads, including the drawer boxes, the drawer boxes were completely tools as well. And and we got to a point with user testing where we found that consumers did not trust it if there was not a little bit of something together that they had to do, I think. The there is an old story. I do not know if it was Duncan Heins or Betty Crocker. 1 of the 2 they first came out with their instant cake mix. It was just powder and consumers did not respond to it. Well, they did not feel like they were doing anything. It is just powder and water. So they changed the recipe to be at an egg, and all of a sudden consumer adoption skyrocketed because now they felt like they are doing something and we found that exact same principle translated here, no 1 trusted that this would be strong enough unless they had like had to screw something together, so even though we did not need it, we then engineered into, you know, a dozen screws into the frame and, you know, 6 or screws, 6 or so screws into the drawer, and at the same time we used for our benefits so we could simplify certain parts. And and double up on some of them. So like a screw hole that would hold things together also served as the leveling foot for the self leveling on the system. So we did a lot of double duty once we were introducing those, but really like we had come to this point where we were so proud of ourselves for this huge thing that we overcame that we thought customers wanted and then we found out loud and clear, they do not want that they want something which is harder to do, but that is consumer perception. So we had to, you know, admit it and know that we are not going to be able to convince consumers we have to know where their adoption rate is going to be and pivot to do something that was slightly more complicated , but if it would make consumers trust the product more so that was almost like a bigger mental overhaul that we had to overcome then than actual, you know, like difficulty in some of the other innovations that we did.

Yeah, that is amazing. Yeah, I have never thought about that. A few minutes ago you mentioned the the, you know, mounting for the anti tip. Like, did the consumer have to find the studs and make sure they drilled into the studs or are you guys able to come up with something novel that kind of just made it work.

So so from a you know, from a technical and testing standpoint, had they mounted this to the wall, just using wall anchors would have been fine obviously now from a compliance safety standpoint that we we knew that we had to call out more than that, and so we did we told users, you got to find a stud and at least 1 of them has to be drilled into a stud. Knowing that if you are running 16 " standards, which, you know, houses for the last 50 or so years are then you are certainly going to hit a stud and within a 24 in span. And that and that the second 1, if you found a second stud, great and if you did not, that could just be done with a wall anchor and the anchors we supplied were self tapping so it would they would drill their own hole for it. So you would not have to pre drill the whole for it. So there was a little bit of yet you still got to find a stud, although we knew that if a consumer decided not to and just went straight to the wall, we knew we were still good.

Oh, okay. Yeah, interesting. So with all the products that impulses helped design, there is always some kind of challenge from a design standpoint that comes up. I know you just mentioned the 1, the surprise challenge of we actually have to make this more complicated . But what was the biggest theme or biggest challenge your team faced in developing the product and how do you solve the challenge?

Um, there were I mean, there were certainly a lot of them. I think that that was a that was a big 1. There were a few other things that were, you know, the the anti tip mechanism that we first came up with this whole drop and lock thing was the initial concept was really hard to tool up super super expensive injection parts and a super expensive steel part. And that that took me and our lead engineer about 16 h of being locked into a conference room, you know, with with snacks and water, that is all we got, but until we figured this out and we had to figure out. You know, a dozen or so initial concepts of how else we can do it until we worked out. I think 2 that were reasonable, that we thought would be cost effective. We tested both out, 1 worked, 1 did not. And but that was a it was it was complex from the point of destabilizer bars had to lock into the system screw into the system from the side, we wanted it to be done in a way that again. 1 person could do so you are talking about 2 frames, 2 stabilizer bars having to be held into place is having to locate the little holes that they go into, and then also have pieces that slide side to side, but also can lock in up and down, so they have to be captured up and down captured side to side and drilled into the wall, and also these bars got to lock the the size and place and. With all the different interactions there, you can do that with a a myriad of combinations between plastic and metal parts, the question is, what is the right combination of what to do it? That was that was a hugely complicated task of just what is the right combination of parts to get that right. I would say in addition to that is how we solve the top shelf. We using the holes at 4 " standards, we could get our top shelf to be a couple inches below where the top of the frame games were, but say you had something that was 6 ft long that you wanted to star across a number of these systems yourself is not flush with the top. But we can not put a bracket up there. So how do we solve for that, how do we come up with a different method to solve for that top shelf we did not want want to make. A bracket that was unique to the top shelf because then now you have got a top bracket and other brackets and that is confusing for the customer. So as part of a late stage change we had to make where it was a very minimalist looking system and we found that while it looked nice and sleek and, you know, Scandinavian almost like ka style, the customers that were considering this had a more traditional aesthetic, so they were looking for some kind of head rail, almost like a crown molding kind of aesthetic for the top. Well, once we had introduced that, how can we use this to our advantage? So we built a stabilizer bar that goes in the front. Now the unit was more stable and we had an aluminum cover that would snap onto that both front and back. And that aluminum cover would capture the top shelf. So again, it is all part of building the system, but it also serves the double duty as as collecting that top shelf and then solving for where do you place a hanging rod? We wanted a hanging rot to go anywhere that a shelf for a drawer could. And we found a way to incorporate that hanging route both into the universal shelf brackets, so if you put a shelf from underneath it, you can put a hanging rod or those same brackets could adapt to the actual frame itself at the very top, so if you wanted to put a rod at the very top, you could and again, these are all pushing ourselves beyond what we needed to There is no reason we could not have said, look, your top hanging rod has to be 4 " below the very top. We could have done that, but we were really, really bent on making this as foolproof as possible and is universally customer friendly as possible. Which led to those few were some massive challenges, but we ultimately got to work.

Yeah, that is that is pretty amazing, very interesting. You a while ago, you you mentioned in the process, you know, building prototypes, what kind of prototyping processes were involved.

So we did a lot of, you know, the of course, old school cutting stuff out of wood and, you know, you know, aluminum and steel standards that were cutting down to shape with with, you know, stock parts that we can find to prove out some concepts. We did a tremendous amount of FDM THREED printing we had. I had. A statist I think it was the F 370 in our office was a real work course. I put it through its paces with a lot of, you know, functional parts as well. We did a lot of SSL printing and poly JIT printing in our engineering lab in North Carolina. And then the rest of it, we so we also did some cast resin components when we got to a point where the 3D prints just were not robust enough under certain loads or we really needed to do the hard core consumer testing and we needed parts that would last for multiple turns of assembly and disassembly We did some machine parts and cast resin parts for that.

But a lot of our prototyping because we were doing aluminum extrusions for the bulk of the framework, we were able to had a relatively low cost do a full extrusion die for that knowing that it was the same profile for the top bottom front back. So we knew we would get longer life out of that tool once we got it right and we we only had to do a couple of changes to that die. So so it ended up being a worthwhile investment.

Good, good. If you could go back in time and change 1 thing about developing the product, what would it be?

So 1 is sizing. I still do not know that our width Sizing Inn rules were right. I feel really confident in the the 4 " intervals we got for the heights, but our unit originally came in 24 " increments and then we also downsized it to 18. And we did possibilities to do, I think 36 and 408I think that was soon after after I left Liberty they we we had done the work already. They later introduced 3030 648 in spans, but those were mostly just for hanging like if you wanted fully hanging across. And not not shelves or things or drawers that were that long, but I still am not sure if 24 " was the right increment. You know, it is. I have a few of these installed in my house now and when you do have some hanging space, it is only 24 " wide. It is not quite as much as you would want want, but we knew it was a good sizing interval that worked with like, you know, the the smallest standard closet alcove was about 6 ft or so, so. You know, working within 2 ft intervals really seem to make sense, but that is something I would want to do a little bit more digging into if that was really the right way to do it. I I think the second would be managing expectations really as a whole within the organization . You know, I did this for Liberty. Liberty is a subsidiary of Moscow. Masco is a giant company. Liberty is a pretty big company. And between what the company's internal expectations were to like get into a new category, how long would it take? There were a lot of pressures that were put on that were external to the quality of the product and the customer experience that you know, we are rushing for our own timeline reasons and do we really and how we manage expectations , we could have done that better. And I think along with our partner retailers managing the expectations of what kind of buying do you guys need to do to actually get this into your store and have it be successful, I think working with them a little bit more to better understand the concept in earlier stages would have helped them set it up for success within the retail environment at the same time.

Sure, sure. Shifting gears just a little bit, as we start to wrap up, what are some of the trends in your world of product development ? What are the some of the trends you see emerging?

I mean, obviously there is AI right, you know, that probably trend within everything, you know, currently certainly a lot a lot of kind conferences and talks that I have been to lately. It is been a lot on how AI is going to change design and product development . I have seen a tremendous amount of it from research product insights. You know, there is just dramatic changes in how we can find and compile data and how we are doing that with AI to really speed and enhance and democratize those parts of the product of the process. But also seeing tremendously powerful tools as far as concept rendering, you know, throwing in some sketches and getting really photorealistic renderings being turned out, you know, concept generation, throwing 2 completely weird different things into an image generator and having it spit out something that interprets 1 into the other. Customer customization of being able to like visualize what something looks like in your space with AR and and and, you know, customize it with with AI and have an AI engine be able to make recommendations based on your space. I think that is that is 1 of the biggest things that I am watching closely to see, you know, where is that going to have the biggest impact, um, and I think the second is I am sensing somewhat of a redirection in how especially industrial designers, product designers, concept designers use CAD and the systems that we know we have come to know and love and how those will change over time and how will those will change from being. You know, super heavy seats of software on super heavy laptops or desktop machines to things that are more cloud based, user friendly, more free flowing. When I started in design, I used a lot in rhino, which was very free flowing, but not as technical as like a solid works or Creo pros, a pain in the but solid works can be as well, but as my tool of choice, but certainly it is more than we need for many application applications within design. So curious and I have been starting to see some new tools launched which are like on shape or things like that which are a little bit more adaptable to concept generation within A3D space that still lends itself to design for manufacturing . So very curious to see how those trends will evolve over time.

Yeah. Yeah, that is very interesting stuff. So as with your your kind of intro of your breadth of experience reflecting on all the challenges and successes and and you know, all your experience with developing product, what words of wisdom would you share with somebody looking to make a significant impact in the product development industry?

Words of wisdom there is. So I think there is a few things. 1 is I think I remember a professor telling you this at 1 point in time. Not everything is design. That and the truth is most of the stuff in the world is is not but everything can and should be it probably needs to be designed and there is so much to improve on the the mundane and the and there is a lot of interesting heavy challenges that come with that. So, you know, yeah, if you are perusing design blogs or things like that, you see all the the award winners are the really cool renderings you are going following big names on Instagram, you see the work that they are doing, it can be inspirational . As far as saying like, wow, this is really cool stuff, but even at the rudimentary level, there is so much to accomplish there, whether it is strides and sustainability, efficiency or manufacturing . Or seeing how we can work with, you know, existing sources or for states sources or things like that, there is tremendous innovation to be done even within the things that do not seem as. I think another 1 I think I mentioned this before is just that notion of, you know, being comfortable being uncomfortable that is kind of where we live within product development , you know, we are trying to make things happen that do not exist yet, right? So, yeah. The more that you are okay with the unknowns and being able to figure out figure it out, I think sets you up for a lot of success within product development . And I think the the last notion I have is, you know, failure is not only an option, it is failure is the way it is part of the process, you will you will never get to, you know, if you do not fail along the way, you are going to come up with the best solution. And, you know, it is something when I especially when I talk to students who will beat themselves up for presenting something and, you know, they feel like they are getting ripped a new 1 in the middle of a critique or something like that, it is like, no, that is that is part of it like there should always be be some there should always be that next step that you can take a product because what is your gen 2, what is your follow up? You have got to have something to improve on that. You know, if you are if you are not tripping along the way, you do not you do not get better at it, you.

Yeah, yeah. Those are great words. I can not agree more. So this has been awesome. Is that before we finish up, is there anything else you want to mention with regards to the product or product development in general?

Yeah. Well, with the product, this is, you know, as I just mentioned, failure is always an option. And I think from what I understand, the product is no longer even in the market now only just like 5 or 6 years later because government regulations on anti tip changed and I had actually consulted with the company to see how we would adapt and fit to the new regulations. And overall we did, we came up new solutions. But ultimately I think the executive leadership was just nervous and decided, all right, it is not, you know, while it was a, you know, a business that was going okay, it was not worth the risk for them, so decided just to table it. So, you know, not every success lasts and that is okay, that is that is as part of part of what we do.

So, yeah, so that was, you know, an interesting learning after all of this is what I consider it a failure. Now, we still did some really cool stuff and innovative stuff and, you know, maybe some version of it. We will see the light of the light of day again sometime.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. Before we end obviously we can not find the product online anymore, but what about Artica? Where can we find out more about Arctica?

Sure, so you can learn more about artica collective at artica com. It is ARTICA collective as it is usually spelled, and then our parent company Artica Inc can be you can learn more about articainc.com and you can find out more about my work in the projects I worked on, including the classes by Liberty project@po.com is pro comm, which is my own portfolio side, personal site. You know, it is got a nice picture of me when I was younger, less dry and and thinner. So my personal web presence.

Awesome. Yeah, awesome. I will make sure I get all that into the show notes and everybody can go check it out. So awesome, this has been great. I really appreciate you and it is a great game.

Yeah, Troy, thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun. I appreciate it.