Entrepreneurship and Design

What can designers learn from successful entrepreneurs? What can entrepreneurs learn from successful designers?

Increasingly new business ideas are based more than just delivering products and services with new functionality or more favorable economic characteristics. Although function and economy remain important, more than ever before products and services must also be elegant, cool, or beautiful — well designed.

Here are some of my thoughts on life as a design entrepreneur. Oh, do consider getting a cup of coffee before you start reading the article for a better enjoyment.

EXPECT A HUGE LEARNING CURVE

One key skill that a design entrepreneur needs to have is the ability to work with or leverage on partners to get the job done. Fortunately, most designers are actually well equipped to be design entrepreneurs as they have the ability to empathize with non-designers and also wear many hats.

The difference here (and this is where the learning curve bit in) is between owning the process and working within a process. Design is only approximately 20% (or less) of the entire product development process. And when suddenly you have to make the calls for the other 80% of the process, things get hard very fast. Once that happens, many other factors such as confidence, initiative, and knowledge come into play.

The good news is that starting out in design entrepreneurship can be done relatively risk free. You can easily work on your personal design projects in your spare time, rather that quitting your day job to do so. Once you have brought your design into the market, stabilized your development and process issues, you can then decide if you want to be a design entrepreneur full time.

DESIGNING FOR THE RETAIL SHELF

Unless you sell your product exclusively online, your will probably need to consider making sure you design works in a retail space. Many designers forget that designing for retail is almost as crucial as designing for the product itself. Designing for retail can be a whole different ball game, and often what is good for retail may not be necessary be good for the product or customer. The best designers will need to make sure they can find a good balance between the two.

Here are a few tips to get you going. Is your design good enough to stand out after you apply the 3-second rule? Is your design easy to understand or use when the customer engages your product superficially? Is your design durable enough to withstand the wear and tear of retail? Does your design radiate the value of the product or communicate it clearly enough?

BE A QUALITY HOUND

Every piece you throw away is a waste of money, and as I’m self-funding this project, the money could have been used for other things like lunch with the family. Just make sure you are upfront with your manufacturer on your target percentage of waste per production run, so that they would know the quality levels you expect.

This is something that many designers may not be used to, as many never have to worry about the details of their product’s quality requirements. Much of it is institutionalized and designers often just need to give the once over and then defer to quality engineers to resolve problems. This is logical as many quality issues stem from production problems. So design entrepreneurs will need to be prepared to take over the work of quality engineers, and to also be prepared to pay the price for constant vigilance.

When dealing with quality issues, there is something I like to call “perception bias” that needs to be managed. Perception of what is good quality differs from designer, manufacturer and consumer. Designers often stand at the end of the strict quality scale, with the manufacturer at the other end of the relaxed quality scale. Disagreements happen when both the designer and supplier have different views on what they consider as good quality. The best way to align quality perceptions is to look at the consumer and determine what they view as good or good enough.

BUDGET, BUDGET AND BUDGET!

The one big things I learnt about self-funding my projects, is that success is all about how you manage budget and control cash flow. On the flip side, designers love to tell the business that the extra cost you put into a design can justify its selling price. Sometimes this is true, but if you don’t put on your pragmatic hat, it will spiral out of control and so will your profits. I always remind myself that having limited resources forces me to make very hard decisions on what is important to the end consumer.

Once you have set your budget, you have to stick to it. If not, it will be a moving target that will make running a business difficult

PRICING IS A SCIENCE AND AN ART

It would be a good time now to touch on one of the hardest thing to figure out as a design entrepreneur, how to price your product.

There are a lot of things to consider when you are working out your pricing strategy. They include: Will your customer be able to afford your price point? Is the selling price high enough to make you enough profit? Is the pricing flexible enough for you to give discounts during a sale? What about wholesale pricing? What about standardizing your pricing across your various distribution channels? Then how does everything reflect back to recovering your initial investment? (See previous point.)

Here is another tip on pricing; you make money when you sell your product. While this sounds rather painfully obvious, it is a subtle change in mindset. If it’s anything I’ve learnt from the best Marketing minds I’ve worked with, we need to adopt a market-in approach to find the price points where consumers will bite. Despite this many people still make the mistake on focusing on cost plus pricing strategies, rather than working backwards to the cost after achieving the right price vs. product offering.

DON’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

At the end of the day, success is all about finding the right balance of all the points we have discussed and also a never say die attitude to keep pushing and finding for the most ideal circumstances for your business.

To make sure you don’t miss any news or interviews subscribe to the Subsign newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/bZIFJr

We would love to hear your feedback and thank you in advance.