Here at Grove when we say we do everything ourselves, we mean that we do everything ourselves. When we make a product we do the whole process from A to Z -- meaning we prototype (design it), test it, make it, sell it, ship it, and do our best to communicate with our customers and respond to feedback. Today we’d like to share with you a little bit about the design process and what prototyping is all about.
As Grove co-founder Ken Tomita is fond of saying, “The design gods make it so you have to go through a lot of failure before you finally succeed.” We believe there are a certain amount of mistakes that must be made (no matter what) before you finally get there-- and the best way forward is to put your head down and work through them until you do.
Grove boasts some dynamic thinkers in our crew and so there are abundant ideas that come and go. We end up designing a lot of products that are shelved for later (or for never) as we are intentionally keeping our company small and have a limited capacity for production. So it is almost as important choosing what not to do as it is choosing what to focus on. The reason for staying small is simple-- we like what we do and want to keep it as manageable and enjoyable as possible.
Prototyping for us is a group effort as there isn’t just one designer. We get feedback throughout the whole system from everybody here at Grove. When it works well we can do things things that we could never do alone by weeding out the ideas that aren’t so great and taking the best from the total of our team.
We believe that prototyping and production go hand in hand. Ken learned with his furniture business that when you are pushing the limits of a material like we do with bamboo-- you need to design it and test it with the actual material. Something might look good on a computer screen, but it’s a whole other ball game when you make it in real life.
We also value feedback from our customers! Through customer emails we heard that our old iPhone 4 cases were too fragile, so we figured out a way to reinforce them for future iPhone cases. Thank you for your help and encouragement!
goGrove!
