Creating a line of basic products that brands can customize

The Concept

Maker’s Row’s company mission is to make the manufacturing process in the United States simple to understand and easy to access. For the first few years of it’s existence the company aimed to do this through facilitating connections between designers (referred to as “brands”) and factories in it’s online marketplace.

This project was an exploration into the concept of facilitating transactions between brands and factories in a new, more hands on way. We learned from analytics that many of our brands were creating the same types of items. The hypothesis was that we could help factories create a very basic version of these items to serve as a starting point from which brands could customize to their liking.

Mapping

Journey mapping was essential to the discovery phase of this project. It was crucial for us to build a clear shared understanding with the factories involved of what the process would look like.

Physical Product Design

Once we had a few factories on board, I worked with our CEO to design an initial set of products, and created the necessary technical drawings to produce several iterations of physical prototypes that would serve as the starting point for brands using the tool. This project didn’t end up being financially feasible, but learnings definitely improved our overall understanding of both sides of our users base, and informed the next phase of the digital product.