Write On! – The Process: Prototyping

One of the most asked questions we receive is to explain the different parts of our manufacturing process. It's not easily explained because it never looks the same. Sometimes we get an idea from a suggestion from a customer, the EDK was based on some customers who owned both the Bolt and Retrakt then decided to "hack" the two pens to work as a small version of both. Other times we get inspiration from a classic design, not just of a pen but of a product in general. The Decograph and Reaktor pens are examples of pens we designed based on being inspired from earlier products. In all of those cases, one thing was a standard, and that was the step of prototyping the product, which was quick for the EDK, a little bit longer for the Reaktor pens, and EXCEPTIONALLY lengthy for the Decograph. What exactly does it mean when we talk about prototype and prototyping? How often are we engaging in some aspect of prototyping? Is it just physical prototypes or do you make digital prototypes? How much of the prototyping is done in-house versus utilizing external 3D printing or laser cutting to get a ballpark of a product worked up? These are all questions we get along with so many other, let's tackle some of them and talk through this process.

In the past we've used the term "prototyping" to include any of the aspects that would fall into Research & Development (R&D), though this is often more due to expediency and the lack of a traditional R&D department. We're going to separate out he Research portion of R&D and focus solely on the Development side in how it impacts prototyping. The development side of prototyping can often be something we work on outside of actively doing research or product planning. It frequently starts when we get new machines, develop new tooling, get inspired by an old advertisement or product we saw that had an interesting design element. Josh is almost always tinkering with new ideas when he's not actively programming a machine or proving out a program. This often ends up being the very early stages of prototyping, and we'll use those products as a jumping off point when we sit down to do some actual planning.

In the planning phase, we'll start with current designs on the market that are similar to the product we are thinking about making. We'll look at legacy designs and expired design patents. We'll see how our design language can be applied in a unique way to these legacy products or designs, how does our style and brand fit into this segment of the market? Does it have a place in this segment of the market? Those are a few questions we often ask when we're in this phase. If the decision to move forward is made, we frequently will take an even harder look at products currently on the market so that we can avoid copying a style or even making a subconscious design homogeneity decision. Ultimately, we want to make something that looks like "us" and feels different, knowing what else is on the market in terms of external design is a big part of this process before we move to the physical prototyping step.

We'll return to Josh's catalog of digital designs and physical prototypes to see if any of them might contain elements we'll adapt or fully rob for the current prototype. These will be updated and almost always far more fleshed out prototypes, many of them fully functional, though most will be very early adaptations that don't resemble the final product in terms of external design. We tend to keep this portion in-house, it can be pricey to outsource this very early stage prototyping just to get something back that will need to be heavily modified to make it to market. Josh or Bill will have created something in FeatureCam or Solidworks that they can machine, though sometimes they'll start with an existing program and then make edits or changes to implement new designs. They'll spend days or sometimes weeks in this stage making tweaks and changes to the software and then running tests on the machines. Sometimes they get lucky and have an early physical prototype, most of the time those initial parts are basically just proof of concept and end up being scrapped because they aren't functional. This step can go very fast and a functional design can appear in weeks or a month (EDK and basik). However, pens like the Vertex and Decograph were in this phase for the better part of a year, and both of those ended up requiring engineering changes after the initial first production run sold out. We don't always get it right the first time, but we try to correct mistakes or improvements as quickly as we can. And the Retraktable took us half a decade from prototype to full production, this is by no means an easy process.

The physical prototyping step isn't the final step though often people assume that's the case. Behind the scenes we are also prototyping marketing language, visual brand designs, packaging concepts, logos, and product nomenclature. This process is often the longest portion, starting right after our initial planning meeting, and running through the final stages of production. Though we don't like to cut it that close, we often run into naming issues or branding similarities that cause us to pivot during this process. The Vertex had quite a few other names before we landed on the Vertex, there is a file on our server over one hundred name ideas just for that pen, and many of them had logo work done to see if they fit. We were testing them right up to the day we got the first functional caps and bodies. It was a pretty stressful time, but we made it through.

During our recent prototyping of the Modal and basik pens, we've begun implementing a portion near the end of the process that is future-proofing the design. In part this is so that we don't need to make major changes to the design in two or three years, but this is also an attempt to cut down costs or negative customer experiences by releasing a sub-optimal product. With our increased machining capabilities and over a decade worth of making machined writing instruments, we can identify potential flaws or areas that might need to be improved much earlier in the production process and with the basik, we corrected them before the first production run was even available. In the long run, this allows us to produce a better all-around product, which means we save time and money at almost every turn, especially where customer issues and complaints are concerned.

This is by no means and exhaustive list of the prototyping process, but it's the main elements explained in brief. Hopefully this provides some insights no how we work through this stage of bringing a product to market. We'll actually take a step backwards in the next segment on this, and look at the research side of things. We'll break down not only the research we do for a new product, but the research we do for limited and special releases, our brand construction, and marketing. This will give you a look at how we tackle different aspect of product design and marketing from the more esoteric side of things.