EPISODE 20 - CHRIS CUNNINGHAM

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 meet with the Head of Innovations and Advanced Concepts at Keurig Dr. Pepper who's path into industrial design was unlike the typical story and has given him the opportunity to work with companies such as Steelcase, Swingline, Disney, and Marvel.

With a diverse background spanning industries from coin-operated video games to household appliances, he has honed his ability to understand and respond to the evolving needs of consumers. In his free time he enjoys flexing his artistic muscles, sketching out architectural designs, and relaxing with his family and friends. 

Chris Cunningham was born in Chicago Illinois and his career has been a dynamic exploration of how design can enhance people's lives. From crafting immersive cooking experiences to designing ergonomic office products, Chris's focus has consistently been on creating products that resonate deeply with users. He believes great design is not merely aesthetic; it's a powerful tool for problem-solving and storytelling.

In today's episode we discuss the Fusion Lamination Platform, an innovative lamination product that Chris spearheaded the design of from the ground up. Chris shares his expertise on up-front design and how he was able to use those early lessons learned to plan out packaging and market space while final designs were being completed. He also provides personal anecdotes on the trade-offs within design, the decision making process, and the realities of idea creation.

Join us as we gain a new insight into the industrial design side of product development and better understand the relationships between teams that work in tandem to bring a product to market.

Show Notes:

To learn more about the laminator and Chris' work, visit https://chriscunninghamdesign.com/

Podcast Transcript:

Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.

Hey, Troy, thank you so much for having me.

yeah, yeah, thanks for being here. So I tell everybody at the start of the show, I worked for a company out of school that had all facets of product development under 1 roof,

industrial design, engineering , prototyping . This is back when s LA machines were state of the art, you know, and like millions of dollars kind of thing. I tell everybody I got my master's degree in product development working there before I started impulse. How did you get into product development ?

Very roundabout started out, had loved architecture, loved designing, creating things, always love solving problems for people followed that path through community college into university, and then just was not my tribe was not my vibe, I did some production engineering work. Because I you know, like that kind of stuff during during school and I was kind of work on my way through school anyway, so I liked the engineering aspects a little woefully inept math. I ended up finding an industrial design and just fell in love and dove in head first and been solving problems for consumers ever since.

Very cool. It is interesting. It is a very roundabout way of getting into product development .

Yeah.

What is your current role and what kinds of products do you develop?

So currently I work for Keurig Dr. Pepper, I work for the appliance business for Keurig, which is great, I work in advanced concepts. So a lot of the work that I do is setting vision for the organization of where we are going to go in the next 357 years. So it is a lot of future casting, a lot of taking the hard core product development skills that I have learned over the last 30 years of my career and saying, okay. If we want to get to this solution to address the consumers need, we need to do these sorts of these sorts of programs, these types of sprints and it is good, you know, it is it helps to be in a company that has a real big belief in innovation and it also helps to, you know, be in a company that we are not just looking to make money on selling the appliances we have that, you know, razor razor blade or coffee maker, coffee consumable model.

Right. Right.

That is nice.

Yeah, interesting. So tell us about the product that you want to talk about today and why you chose that 1 in particular.

Yeah. So, you know, when we talked I think the other day that there is a lamination range that I did when I was working for Echo Brands and it was a really kind of interesting fun project from from a development standpoint. It is kind of a soup to nuts evaluation of where we were from a laminating business standpoint. So understanding how we are making business in lamination, I do not think anybody laminates anymore, which is kind of an interesting, interesting product unless people are making fake I d's. But you know, back in the day, that is what these were used for. But, you know, we had a ton of different skew peripheration . We had a lot of different with those Skus. We had a lot of different mechanisms to drive them. We had a lot of different platforms. So, you know, the interesting thing with that program was how do we how do we number 1 address what the consumers want by giving the right feature sets for the right price. So, uh, and then you are giving the flexibility to the retailers to have their own Skus and then making it good for us to say like, look, you know, now we currently have, you know, 2530 different laminator. How do we really trim this down to A core group of, you know, 10 to 15 laminator to basically service the globe, the globes need from a lamination standpoint. So whether it was Asia, Europe to US. South America, we just wanted to make sure that we had a range that would kind of deliver for everybody.

Yeah, interesting. So did I understand right, you because you developed a separate SKU for each retailer, that is why you got any and then you you ended up this 1 you had to take you brought it down to a fewer.

Yeah, so it is it is an interesting it is an interesting thing, right, how that how that happens, like, you know, you have, you know, super eager salespeople, um, which which are there to help drive the business. They are there to help sell product. Sometimes they will get it. They will get a request from like in this instance, like a W B Mason say like, Hey, could you give me like this? Laminator is great, but could we do? This extra feature, so instead of doing like 3 mill, 5 mill, could it only do 5 mm, it is like, okay, sure, so we would, you know, create that because, you know, we want to get the business. At the time that was happening, the business was growing leaps and bounds. We were worried about inventory. We were not worried about complexity and supply chain. We are just worried about, you know, making sure we are keeping our retailers happy and you know, moving the needle from a growth standpoint. So that is like how it happened, like somebody would come off and, you know, like, you know, like, you know, Troy and Bob's, you know, office stationary story be like, Hey, can we get our own laminator and our salespeople, like of course you can get that like we have got a great design team, great engineering team. We can bring you whatever we want and we would do that. So, you know, as as things got, um, I guess as times got a little bit tougher this happened in like the, you know, early 10 s or the early teens. So we are working on this. And 1213, you know, we have just gone through the recession of O 8. We are trying to, you know, make sure that we were being smart about how we manage our business and a little bit more thorough and thoughtful as opposed to opportunistic .

Interesting. Yeah, so the project was to actually kind of rain all that in and have 1 line that I assume different sizes is what what it can tell you.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, the the the idea was, you know, we had anywhere I think we had roughly about 27 different Skus. We had a handful that were in Asia. We had a handful in Europe, a few in South America and a bunch in the US and they were all basically doing the same thing. So, you know, we had your, you know, super high end product that would allow for more control and more customization and then we had very basic like, you know, just run a piece of paper through with the film. So when we looked at that on that challenge we are like, wow, know, like why do we have 8 different Laminators that do this. And 6 that do this, like can we get away with 2, like, can we get away with like what is what is the lowest common denominator, which, you know, it was always a struggle for me with math but, you know, it is like we we get to this, like, all right, what are the core needs from the consumers, what are the consumers want? So we would start and say, all right, when you are when you are looking to spend, you know, under $50 on a laminator, what do you want on it? It is like, well, you know, we want it to be. You know, simple direct like the clearest path to the edge product, we want it to be good quality. We wanted to have, you know, maybe good brand recognition, but you got to hit that price, got to deliver around the quality. And it does not need a lot of, you know, frills or bells and whistles and then on the other end of the spectrum, we would talk to like high end photo output folks and say, like, all right, what are you looking for? Like, you know, we need the ability to, you know, adjust the adjust the temperature Mid, you know, mid process and we need the ability to, you know, run a bunch of different films. We need the ability to do sheep fed versus roll fed and we are like, okay, all right, so so it would we took all that information, kind of synthesized it, brought it back to our retailers and said, hey, look, this is what we are hearing from our consumer base. This is what the user saying. You know the user wants these features at this at this level. This is what we are proposing to do. So we proposed a new range of, you know, 8 different laminators to cover off. You know, we had some, you L and some electrical issues, not issues, but, you know, requirements we had to meet outside outside the States got everybody aligned to that and then we started to build, you know, what our what our opening price point platform was going to be and then what were the things we could do to shift and adjust that platform to bring it really close to that mid price point, but then, you know, stop there and then move to a mid price point platform and then from that mid price point platform, we actually were able to build the mid and the high. So you know, we we started it and it was good. We got a lot of economies of scale, which was really good the industrial design was super flexible across the range. So you could tell very easily that there was a step from, you know, from opening price point to mid to high and then we were also able to work on the user, you know, the user experience and the new, you I from a very basic kind of level, what you would expect under $50 to what you would expect to 500 and then, you know, the the cool thing for that project for me was because we were doing all that work. With the consumers up front, we did that work with the buyers and and our commercial partners. I was able to continue to push through and work through the packaging and the messaging in store talk about like, all right, this is what the planograms set is going to look like, this is what we are going to do for at the time, Office Depot, Officemax, this is what we are going to do for Staples, this is how we are going to be able to, you know, build out. A little bit of space inside a target and, you know, some of the other retail partners were used at the time, so it was, you know, it was really nice like does not happen often, but the ability to take that knowledge you learn on the front end, developing what what users need all the way to delivering what, you know, the consumer needs on shelf to make their decisions and and really, you know, get the right product in hand.

Yeah, yeah. Was there any anything new or innovative in the product or was it more of just an exercise of let us bring skew down and revamp, I guess revamp the I D and kind of build a new family?

When the project started out, we did not think. Our retail partners were going to be as excited as they were about this, but they got really hot and really excited. They are like great like simplify for us here. We want to want to reduce our inventory, maximize the turns. So we left some lamination tech on the shelf, but we did we did work on some things with halogens, we worked on some things with some different heat sources. We have worked on some things where where we did some different cooling inside. Where we had heated rollers and cluing so it was there were a lot of puts and takes that that we explored in the end we ended up going with, um, what we what we could do, but what was going to be the most efficient across the platforms that hit the timing, you know. So the I always 1 of the guys I worked for very early on in my career is like, look, you know, we can make whatever you want, it just costs. And, you know, the reality is you have that triangle of time spec and cost, so if you want to condense time, you know, or if you want to accelerate the time, you have to pull something in from someplace else. So, you know, we were very focused on cost. We were very focused on, you know, making sure we delivered the right experience and you know, some of those things we just were not able to to push through

Yeah, yeah. It kind of goes along the winds of the what is the long answer question. You can have it fast, you can have it cheap or you can have it. I can remember the 3rd 1, but you only get to pick 2, right?

Yeah, yeah, it could be good. It could be fast. It could be cheap.

Right.

You pick yeah, all get to so yeah, which is, you know, I mean, sorry, go and try.

Yeah. So, no, no, go ahead.

It is just it is it is 1 of those hurdles in development and I think it is like, you know, when when you come in as like a young designer, young product developer, you are like going to, you know, we are going to drive it through and change the world but, you know, those trade offs become really they become real. And it is like, you know, as as a designer, as a you know, somebody who is always been kind of the voice of the consumer, I am always like, Yeah, I know they are not going to want that, like, you know, we have and you know that and that is the healthy tech then the healthy tension. Right. Like between yourself and like, the engineer or the market or, you know, marketers, like, yeah, I need it out at 1999 and, you know, the engineer and the designer looking at each other, yeah, okay, this is going to happen like. That is great, but we just do not know how we are going to do that now. If you want to do it, if you want to do these things, we can get it for 1999, but it is like, you know, how do you how do you address it and do that?

Sure, sure. So we have helped design literally thousands of products in every journey is different. Can you kind of walk us through the journey of I mean, you have talked a little bit about, you know, reducing the skew count and all that. But can you walk us through the journey of actually developing the product from a concept standpoint, all the way through to your shelf.

Yeah. So, I mean, it was it was really strange because, I mean, like like most of these things, you know, they are fragile when they start, you know, it was an idea. And it was myself and I think 1 of the engineering directors we were just having a beer and, you know, we were talking about just, you know, everybody I think, you know, when you are inside an organization , you get a little cynical sometimes on how you do things and we are both like, Man, why do not we have so many. Like staplers. It is like, you know, we see a ton of states like, yeah, it is like, why do not we have and then, you know, we kind of talked about it. We are like this is why I kind of could kind of rationalize it, and then we were talking about laminator and it is like what kind of look at each other, like I do not really know why and then we talk to our marketing partner. He is like it is like I do not know, like we are focused on this other stuff. We are not even thinking about laminator, so. We are like, okay, so, you know, between, you know, him and I were kind of spitballing this around and like, you know, digging through, you know, what what the what the regions were looking for and then pulling all the product in. So, you know, like we just started ordering product because that is 1 of the nice things about being with a big organization . You know, it is like I want to see what that Japanese laminator is like, bring it in and you are like this is the same as what we are selling in South America. Like like literally a different badge.

Right?

So it is like what what are we doing here and why is it that way? So, you know, like we got all that together and then. You know, it is just kind of looking at them evaluating them and then, you know, the our marketing counterpart would come in kind of like it was not was not a war room that would be that would be very generous. It was more like a conflict closet. You know, we are where we just had like all the product shoved in there but, you know, we started doing we started doing some tear downs and started breaking stuff apart. We are like, well, they are doing this a little bit different here. They are doing like, why is that? And it is like, you know, and then talk like, then we pulled in and this was all, you know, very much like. I would not say after hours, but super skunk work and it was like, you know, we pulled in a sourcing guy and then once we once we pulled the sourcing guy in kind of set some bells off and everybody's like, What are you guys doing, like what is going on here? Um, so so once once that cat was out of the bag we are like, hey, look, this is what we feel. The opportunity is, um, we feel like there is an opportunity to, you know, build economies of scale, feel like there is an opportunity to, you know, align regions to specific, you know. Line regions to what the consumers are looking for. So what the features and benefits need to be. And then an even bigger conversation was and we think it is time to align to brands because at the time we had like 4 different brands across this. So you know, how do we unify across? All those different areas and and everybody is like, okay and, you know, of course the next question was like, can we make any money? You know, it is like that this is all great. Sounds like a fun academic project, but is there money to be made and you know, that is that like the last straw, the last bit was bringing the sourcing guy and they say like, yeah. If you were to shift this from this factory here and move this to 1 group and have them doing this and move this to another group and we would definitely be able to get economies of scale. There were some other things going on in the business where they were looking to bid the appliances, some of the larger appliances. So, you know, there there was a ready talk of pulling products away from certain vendors because sometimes, you know, sometimes a vendor will do your favor and they are like, yeah, we will make this for you because we are making these other things and we make a lot of money here.

Right.

Um, so sometimes it is it is difficult like you will upset the apple cart, but we were already kind of it was a perfect storm of activities that everybody is looking to kind of see how we costs reduce and how we could, you know, make things more efficient.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

logistics and all the stuff.

For sure, it is interesting because, like, there are a lot of like unspoken costs that happen inside of, you know, big organizations and and inside of product development , like, you know, the packaging cost is never really talked about it is just a bucket on the bill of materials. It is like packaging, that is what it is. It is like, wait a minute, gang. Like if we are really trying to be efficient here, we are really trying to save like why is the packaging so much more here? And so much less here here it is like well because you know, the vendor that we use right now, they just outsource that packaging and it is a line item cost for them and the other vendor actually does it internally. It is like, okay, well, let us is is there an opportunity to build up that that economy of scale by using that 1 person that that factory goes out to and then everybody using that group. So, you know, there there was there was some that happened that way. There is also some inventory costs that are just just are not really talked about. There is ability to if you over buy in 1 market. Can you shift that to another market so that, you know, there is, you know, shift that inventory over there and resell it? So there is there is a lot of those things. That just go un articulated because you are in a hurry and you are rushing, but we had enough examples of where that had happened in the past where we could say, hey, like, you know, this this thing costs us, you know, $200,000 because we were not able to meet this opportunity. Like if we if we had inventory we could move, you know, we could we could be more opportunistic that way and we could flex especially globally, which which was a big goal of the business at the time was to focus more outside of just North America and Europe, but you know, really kind of build a foothold inside of Asia, build more of a foothold in Brazil, South America and those places.

Interesting. Excuse me, what was the timeline like?

So originally originally we were going to operate on like a 24 to, you know, 24 to 30 month kind of kind of time plan. We ended up doing it in 18.

Oh, wow.

Because, you know, the the cat was out of the bag, right? Like, we were really trying to like, get all our ducks in a row and make sure so we would have, you know, ideally we would have spent about 6 months in that upfront. So, skunk worky kind of phase like. Figuring things out, it is really what what I what I do now called the advanced development phase. So it is like, you know, all right, we are working through the ad like we are evaluating like all right, these are different platforms we can build different technologies we could use. How do we vet those? How do we make sure that those those are going to work? But we we basically kind of pulled the trigger and then it was all hands on deck and, you know, a lot of trips to Asia, a lot of, you know, a lot of late nights like we had we had a lot of a lot of this manufacturing was going on in Portugal at 1 point. So go into that going to the factory and really digging in with them and understanding and actually that factory was was 1 of the ones that was doing all the all the all holistically, so all their packaging, everything else and we are like, why is this so much more here and, you know, so it just you know, it was it was quick like the product development piece of that. Building the the internal engines, building the the different platforms, building the you I would say was the level of complexity was really high, but but the sourcing supply chain, you know, customer relationship piece was equally as complex. So it is just like this really hairy kind of a project that that was it was fun to do and and we had a good time but it just was super condensed.

TYeah. Was it 1 of those things once the upper management learned what was going on there, like, yeah, we want this and we want it now or was it you had to go fast because of all the other things you were working on with vendors or?

The combination , I think they wanted it and they wanted it now and then, you know, once once you get the commercial team on board and they, you know, and they are pumped up about it, they can get it in and they are like, hey, like, you know.

Yeah.

Staples wants this and they want this right away, like W. B. Mason like they are they are looking for this, like, you know, some of the other big C catalog players, which is where most of office products has done is through that that catalog channel, but it is it really becomes a poll. From from those guys and, you know, it is sales guys do not like to tell anybody, know, and, you know, they can they only hear, know, so much from the engineers before they are like, Hey, we need some help here moving moving this and you know, it is not only engineers, but it is it is development , it is marketing, it is like, yeah, guys, we realize that, but, you know, we have to develop it. We have to make sure that, you know, when we are when we are running the process that the consumers are.

Um, you know, they are happy with with the user experience, you know, like they are happy with the tension in loading, they are happy with the resistance and the buttons. Those things take time. So, you know, it was it was just a lot of camping out in factories and and with the development team to make sure we could get it out the door.

Yeah, you mentioned yourself and I think you said engineering manager and then marketing person and then eventually the sourcing person other than that, like how many people were involved in developing the product from an industrial design standpoint and then actually engineering and all that.

Yeah, I think so. You know, we we did the industrial design internally. So we had a team industrial design UI, UX. So we had a team of like 5 folks. So, you know, it was not it was not hard core. 100 % of the time, but it was a few months where everybody was pulling in the same direction because it was such a big program, you know, I think there were like we ended up with 9 units, 9 to 11 units, so. With that range, like everybody had like, all right, you are going to work on opening price point, you are going to work on mid you guys are going to work on, you know, the mid and h p you know, high end stuff together. Let us work on the UI across all those and you know was it was very fluid. We had a couple of engineers internally working on that. We had electrical engineers working on, you know, what software we needed with what the firmware had to be, how we had to develop from a mechanical standpoint, you know, just just the processing And, you know, our you know, our mechanisms inside. So we had we have a the way we worked at that point or the way Echo worked at that point, it was a smaller technical team internally with with really high knowledge, you know, high level contributors and knowledge experts, so or subject matter experts is the term I am struggling for. So we had we had a couple of folks like that. But then we had a massive network. From a vendor standpoint that would co develop with us. So a lot of a lot of that technical development happened with the vendor, which which made it difficult because, you know, you are working with them to develop the product not having necessarily a contract that they are going to get the product. So you know, some of that is very difficult to navigate. I will just say so.

Yeah, I can imagine.

It is. It is it is better when you can do it all internally. The challenge is and I I do not know if if you you have been doing this long enough, you probably have like no matter how much data you create internally, no matter how much CAD and how well you finalize the design. Almost always the the folks that manufacture are going to take it and redo it and they are going to say, got that now we are going to do it the way we need to do it to get it out the door. And then, you know, you have to manage that transition, but I think what we were trying to do at that point in time was alleviate a lot of that and say, you know, hey, look like let us work on this together and and let us develop it now, I think since then, you know, this is not necessarily the Wild West but it is, you know, early teens. Um, I think a lot a lot of factories that I work with, a lot of vendors that I work with now are way more savvy about that. It is like, you know, will co develop with you, however. In when we co develop their agreements there is IP that is put in place, like if we develop IP it is yours, it is mine, we could use it if, you know, there is usually, you know, a fee associated with that. Like if production is not a part of this, we are going to, you know, move towards move towards, you know, just just a fee based service for what it is we are doing.

Like I was going to reply with, I have never designed a product, even a part that the vendor has not said, yeah, we at least want to change this, right? I mean, there is always something that changes.

I do not know what that is like. And it could be the simplest part, right? Like I have done that with sheet metal, like when when I was doing production engineering , like. Instead of doing cast parts, we did some stamped up, so it is like we are just laminating instead of casting and I did that the guys like, no, no, I just and instead of doing round holes, let us do let us do square hole, let us do notches because it will just be in better and it is like. Okay, I get it. I mean, I think there is there is like this quest for, you know, always doing better but at some point like it is it is got to be reductive, the amount of duplication that takes part or maybe it is maybe it is a good way to learn it like I do not know by copying the by copying the parts and redesigning them yourself, maybe you get a better intention of what of what the your design is, I do not know, it is just weird.

TYeah, sure. Yeah, I have we we just finished a design for an inventor and it is super complex probably, I do not know 65 parts and we got it to a point where I know it functions the way he wants it to function, but it is not done. And there is no reason for us to keep designing this right now because we need to send it to the vendor because they are going to tear it to shreds and we need to incorporate all that and we can work on some of the things we want to work on when we do that, so.

Yeah. Well, that is that is an interesting thing too because, like, if if you are doing it at 65 parts, like when a vendor gets it, they are they are like, I do not know they are they are like, wake up and get out of bed kind of moment is like, how do I make this into 6 parts? Which which is 1 of the interesting things. With the laminator is like there were a ton of parts of those machines and, you know, 1 of the things that we did all the tear downs is like, okay, what is the basics that we need here and then how do we them up because, you know, it just it is like that. That is sort of a thing where somebody just said, hey, this is a laminator we want to do and somebody kind of created a design and turned it over, but doing that platform kind of based that was was really more like, hey, like let us let us tighten it down and really get to like the key amount of subsystems and you know the platforms like we had a heating platform, we had a rolling platform, we had, you know, our electric platform, we had our UI platform, so it was all just swappable. You know, I mean, at least that was the dream, you know. So we got pretty close.

Yeah. Cool, with with all the products Impulse has helped design, there is always some kind of challenge that comes up. What was the biggest challenge with developing this line of.

Biggest challenge, I think for us, we had a shift in well, let me we had a shift in leadership in the middle. So I think that was a good thing. I think that pushed everybody in the right direction. I think the challenge here was just, you know, how do we how do we make sure that like we were ruthlessly trying to simplify it every at every step and I think everybody always takes simplicity for granted and it is like that is that is easy, of course you do it that way, like, you know, a lot of folks and even the folks that I worked with, some of the folks that worked with, especially in leadership on this project, they did not they did not have product development shops or background and they just were like, we will make make it simpler to, you know, reduce the complexity it is like, okay, but, you know, the the elegant part of simplicity is the complexity it takes to get there. So, know, how do you really you know, how do you really communicate that and, you know, in a condensed timeline and like, you know, I remember we we did a we did a grid for selling the product of like, okay, here are the here are all the features, here are the models and like, let us just lay it out and, you know what when we would lay it out they would not pyramid and, you know, like like our s VP was like it is got to be a pyramid, it is got to be, you know, the cheapest 1 is going to have the least amount and the most expensive has to have the biggest amount. And and that is that is just how people read it. He is like Turbotax. It is got to be like Turbotax. Like, think about Turbotax does it and, you know, to this day I do not like looking at the Turbotax but, you know, it was a great exercise because it really forced a lot of critical thinking. And it is like, well, you know, if we are saying it, if we are saying this feature needs to be on a lower level unit, why, you know, why is that the case and is it is it a user requirement and if it is a user requirement , okay, how do we quantify that? Know it is not just like that, that fringe user, but the actual core user and then how do we build it up that way? So I would say, you know, that was really like establishing the feature sets, establishing you know, how we transition from. Opening price point to middle price point to high price point. Those were those were the things that that were really difficult to justify, I think because we had done so much platforming work, we knew how to do it all. You know, we knew how to how to move from like. You know, like a mill thickness that was, you know, like 3 mill to something that was 10 or 12, like we knew like what what the subsystems were that were, we are going to have to do that we knew the types of materials that it was going to take and we actually had. Such a wide library, we could do it a lot of different ways. So based on, you know, the nice thing about breaking this down was almost like from a high from a high price point unit stamp point of view, we had a bunch of different ways that that was being executed. So like the roller mechanism was being executed like I think out of the 30 units we had. I think 7 of them were those high price point units. And out of the 7 there were 4 different ways. It was pulling the pulling the lamin in it. So it was it was great. So it is like, hey, we have got these different things. So technically, I I would not say that we are. There were a ton of, you know, technical challenges. I think the challenges were how do we make decisions on what is the right way to do this moving forward? That is going to address what the consumer needs, what they are looking for from an experience standpoint while we deliver what we need from a business standpoint.

Very interesting. Shifting gears a little bit, as we start to wrap up, what are some of the trends like that you see emerging in product development ?

Yeah. So I think AI is great, you know, there is there is some really good image generation stuff for I think AI is the new smart, you know, I just got back from what was at the beginning of beginning of June, I was in Seattle for the Smart Kitchen Summit, we were talking about AI and food, but then, you know, AI just in general and how it is how the term is really being misused. Because, you know, I think the phones have had AI almost since the beginning with just auto correct spelling. So, you know how that happens. I think that that is becoming more and more interesting. I think what I what I like seeing from a trend standpoint is more. You know, more high end manufacturing jobs coming back to the States, you know more of the semiconductor work coming back here, more of those things happening, not necessarily evening out the trade imbalance, but bringing some of that know how and and that ability back to the United States because I think for the last 50 years, we have been all showing that. Um, so so that is interesting, you know, more collaboration in teams so and more diverse teams. Like, are you i persons in all our stuff? So, she is she is plugged in from from the Can you hear those dogs or is it just me?

I can hear the dog now. Yeah. It is all right.

Yeah, it is all right. She is got to let everybody know she is this. So, um, yeah, so I mean, you know, like just having more cross functionality, I you know, I see less. And maybe it is maybe it is just the organization that I am in but, you know, when I started out probably when you started out there were a lot of heroes, you know? There there were a lot of there were a lot of folks that are like, get on my back and I will take you up the mountain where I just do not see that as much. Now I see more more people comfortable being like, Yeah, I do not know. Like, I I do not know what is going on. Like, let us figure it out together. You know, I think there are still leaders in the organization but they lead differently, you know, it feels more you know, there is more appreciation for the work that is done. There is more appreciation of the work life balance now. You know, and and I also yeah, I also feel like there is a drive towards depending on where you work in what industry you are working on, there is a drive towards quality over, you know, it is quality and reduction of complexity, so for the user, so. Mean, yeah. It is kind of what I am thinking. They can answer.

Yeah, that is good. You have been doing this for a while, so reflecting on all the challenges and the successes that you have had developing products, what kind of words of wisdom would you share with somebody looking to make a significant impact in the product development industry?

I would say you do not get into it because you love it, you know, get into it because you love solving problems, I think, you know. Having a passion for at least for me, for for helping people and and solving consumer challenges really helps, you know, having having a appreciation for craft and like the ability to craft things and and know what good looks like, I think is really important but I think it is just, you know, have have the energy and passion for it. I think passion will get you. A lot further than skill, you know, you can always pick the skills up as you go, but if you love what you are doing, if you love solving those problems and making things, there is always there is always a seat free at the table.

Yeah, yeah, that is good stuff. Totally agree. So awesome, this has been great before we go. Is there anything else you want to mention with regards to product development or the the laminator?

No, no, I mean, you know, I think I appreciate the opportunity to talk about them. I have not told the laminator story in a long time. Typically, when I tell this story, my kids kind of just gloss over. Do I do not care? And they are like, honestly, what is the laminator? It is like, well, it is very fake. I d's and they are like an I d like so no. So I think it is been great. I appreciate you doing this. I think it is a great idea, Troy, I think. You know, being able to talk to people and share these experiences are always helpful. Like I have been plowing through the channel since since we talked. So there is a lot of great stuff out there. So thanks, thanks for.

Yeah. And they are not on the market anymore, right?

That is a great question. Um, probably not but, you know, you go to Echo brands, I think they might be under swing line GB C general, but you could probably find them. I mean, I do not know what anybody would use 1 for anymore. You know, I mean, I had access to them and frankly it was it was just like a really tight niche of people that love them for crafting and things like that, so.

Yeah, if I can find it on their website, I will put that in the show notes, but there is a picture of it on your website, right?

Yeah, I have got like, a whole whole page of them or.

Yeah. I will put that in the show notes so if anybody wants to go see that, they can check it out there. So, so awesome. I really appreciate you joining this Chris.

Yeah. No, I I appreciate the time and like I said, thanks again for having me out. It is awesome.