Full Case Study Showing Step-By-Step Process

The new Shopify and JD.com partnership is exciting news for Shopify merchants.  The partnership deal makes the challenges of selling goods to the Chinese market much easier. Shopify merchants can add the official JD.com app from the Shopify Marketplace and begin selling to Chinese customers in under four weeks. Here is what you need to know to get started selling on JD.com:

Building a hardware product prototype is a critical element in any product design lifecycle.  Prototypes provide early market feedback as to whether a product has the potential to lead a market segment, gives you early insight into necessary design changes, and helps teams minimize risk at every stage of the product development lifecycle.  Done right, prototyping helps remove design risks and leads to successful product outcomes.  Here are the 6 types of prototypes every successful physical product design goes through: Concept Sketch Prototype Bench Model Prototype Fully Functional Rapid Prototype […]

Product ideas, inventions and inventors have been making headlines in the media lately. Just this week the Ottawa Citizen covered an Industry Canada Inventor Report that showed 13 per cent of Canadians consider themselves inventors – are you one of them? If so, you may be interested in knowing what it takes to move your idea from the “ah-ha” moment to distributors and store shelves. Last month, Profit Magazine took a stab at unraveling this daunting process with a well written piece called the “Inventor’s Playbook”.  In the article they […]

Design 1st offers help to many innovators to commercialize their product ideas providing them everything they need from patent submissions to design, marketing and manufacturing specifications.  This approach allows them to control the business direction from licensing to full production and sales. With the increasing number of Canadian innovators and inventors, corporations are taking notice. A research paper led by MIT professor and author Eric von Hippel emphasizes this point stating: “Companies will have to help their own product developers look at consumer-developed innovations with new eyes – not just […]

How will you fund your next hardware project? Funding is critical to the success of any new physical product development project. It’s one of the key ingredients on top of a great idea, a talented team, and a tight product-market fit that every company needs to push forward to market.   Physical product development is a cash flow business, necessary to get to market, manufacture, ship to customers, and scale your sales. Over 25 years, Design 1st has seen 1000+ physical product development projects move from concept to manufacturing. Each of these projects navigated funding challenges.    To help […]