Start-ups and E-commerce entrepreneurs are developing custom products to meet niche customer demand. This allows them to control quality, features, and most importantly, margins! The challenge is getting ideas into manufacture-ready designs, building out a supply chain and ramping up volume production with consistent quality. Discover the process one entrepreneur went through to manufacture his proof-of-concept prototype idea for a mass market.

Ottawa inventor Jay Conohan walked into the Design 1st office in January 2013 with a product idea and the enthusiasm to dive headfirst into the product development process. Now 10 months later, he has a working prototype, Kickstarter campaign and is preparing for the ABC Kids Expo in Las Vegas to showcase his product. Here’s a quick summary of Jay’s journey and how he re-invented bath time for toddlers. The Product Idea: Like many inventors, Jay stumbled across the “Bath and Play” product idea by accident; literally, his son Ronyn […]

When engineer and mother Gwenda Lindhorst–Ko visited the Design 1st offices for the first time in 2009 she brought only herself and an idea. The idea was an invention that would solve the novel problem of keeping her child’s milk cold throughout the school day. The end result was “myColdCup” an innovative product guaranteed to keep milk cool for 5 + hours. Recently, Gwenda was featured on the television show “Backyard Inventors” – a video of her segment is included below.

When you hear “milk chocolate”, what colour comes to mind? In our efforts to support a recent promotional program for Hershey, Design 1st had some chocolate colour co-ordination to sort out. The program involved a pickup truck fully wrapped in printed vinyl, a giant painted fiberglass chocolate bar structure, and backpacks sewn with custom-printed fabric. Before Design 1st was brought on board the project, Hershey’s mobile marketing firm, Gearwerx had been busy developing print graphics for everything from billboards to chocolate bar wrappers. The Design 1st challenge was to first […]

When products are retired to make way for improved technology they are often cast aside to make room for newer, more efficient products.  Examples include the horse buggy, VCR Players, Cassette players, pagers – the list can go on. As new innovative products enter consumer markets they offer more for less – making their predecessors obsolete – a phenomenon commonly referred to as disruptive technology. A contradiction to this “disruptive technology” trend is the TV antenna and receiving free TV over the airwaves. Large outdoor towers, indoor wire trees were the […]