Driving Disruption: Ian Peterman of Peterman Design Firm On The Innovative Approaches They Are Taking To Disrupt Their Industry
An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti
Blending branding and product design is something not a lot of agencies do. There are some, and it would be wrong of me to claim to be the only ones, however I believe the approach of integrating branding with product development and innovation is a very important shift. While large brands who have massive value attached to their brand typically are very careful with brand and its intersection with products, medium and smaller brands often ignore this, and after a few products end up having losing the continuity between their products and their brand, which is never a good thing when it comes to commercializing a product and can make creating customer loyalty harder than it needs to be.
In an age where industries evolve at lightning speed, there exists a special breed of C-suite executives who are not just navigating the changes, but driving them. These are the pioneers who think outside the box, championing novel strategies that shatter the status quo and set new industry standards. Their approach fosters innovation, spurs growth, and leads to disruptive change that redefines their sectors. In this interview series, we are talking to disruptive C-suite executives to share their experiences, insights, and the secrets behind the innovative approaches they are taking to disrupt their industries. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ian Peterman.
Ian Peterman is a recognized authority in sustainable innovation and conscious entrepreneurship. He is the Founder of Peterman Design Firm, where his global team supports funded startups, scaling companies, and Fortune 500s to develop circular, market-ready products rooted in purpose and profitability. Ian is also the CEO & Founder of Phoenix Innovations, a firm dedicated to bridging the gap between startups and SMBs or enterprise partners through curated, problem-driven innovation events and strategic consulting. He developed the Conscious Design™ methodology, co-authoring the book and hosting the podcast of the same name — a strategic framework that empowers brands to integrate sustainability, user-centric thinking, and long-term impact across every stage of a business. A sought-after speaker, podcast host, and author, Ian champions conscious design as a catalyst for meaningful, lasting change in business and beyond.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about disruption, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
My path is a pretty direct one, I’ve been interested in design and engineering since I was a kid. Star Trek and James Bond gadgets were a huge part in my fascination with design and technology. I started learning CAD and drafting when I was 12, helping my father with design projects, and by 16 I secured an internship with a telecommunications laser company doing design and CAD work under the guidance of some amazing and very talented engineers. From there, I spent a decade working with big companies like HP, and smaller ones like Barefoot Sound. I had always done contract work on the side but then decided to start my first agency with some partners in 2013. I founded a new agency in 2017, Peterman Design Firm, which I still own and am now involved in new ventures as well.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
We stand out in a few ways. The first way we separate ourselves is through our Conscious Design methodology which ensures sustainability and other factors, such as human-first design, guide the entire process. We do this for every brand, even ones that aren’t eco- or mission-first. We believe in being long-term partners with our clients, often working from ideation and innovation stage all the way through commercializing the product into the market and us thinking about these things at the beginning always makes for better results. Because we’re so public about our process, I co-authored the book Conscious Design and host an (almost) weekly podcast of the same name, it now brings us clients who share the same values and it’s great to work with them. The second is that we require most clients to go through our Discovery process to make sure the idea and the goals around it are valid and achievable. A lot of design firms and contractors will just take the clients idea, and run with it in the direction the client points in. When you do that, you have a happy client at first, but they quickly lose faith as the bills increase and there are changes late in the process that could have been caught earlier. We believe in making sure we know all the obstacles in the way and have created a path around those to get to our goal, a successful product launch. Lastly, we’re less focused on the industry our clients are in, and more on clients who want to make an impact with their product and be successful at it. While we have 100% success rate in finding a path forward for our clients through our Discovery process, not everyone moves forward with us. I remember a client we did an entire discovery process for, identified everything we needed to avoid and accomplish to make sure their project could move forward including budgets, and then they disappeared for a few months. When they came back, they had gotten a different estimate from another company far below what we estimated the investment needed for the project to be (we literally brought in one of the only companies on the planet capable of working on the technology in partnership with us to build our estimate) and they ultimately went with the cheaper offer believing the low-ball estimate would get them across the finish line. It’s been years now, and that client’s project has never seen the light of day, they didn’t secure the funds we had said they needed, and so it failed. Not every client likes the solutions we have, but we never create low offers to capture a client, and then kill the budget with constant over charges.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
This is a hard one. The first that comes to mind is having grit, or being stubborn I guess. There have been many times when things have gotten hard, payrolls delayed, clients being difficult, employees not turning out, and more. The key part for each of those was deciding to keep moving forward and learning each time. Second, always being interested in learning. As I’ve run businesses for over a decade now, there is always a new lesson to learn, sometimes from unexpected place. I recently started working with an amazing company that’s just a couple years old, and they had an agreement that was a perfect example of something I’d tried to make. Lastly, and this one can be really hard sometimes, is patience. I have to remind myself sometimes daily to be patient. Things can take time, not everything, but definitely enough to annoy you if you want to get things done quickly. A great example of this is working with clients, we have some that take a year or more before they make a decisions to start a project, and there can be many client induced delays. We love to start a project and complete it as quickly as possible, but we have to go the pace of our clients, who have other factors deciding how quickly they move besides us, so it’s a constant reminder we have to be patient.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.
Having to choose between two good options is difficult, but not as much as between two bad options. When you have two bad options, I’m always reminded of the Trolley Problem for psychology and philosophy. When you have two good options, the worst thing that can happen is a good thing. The hardest choices between two good things I’ve ran into is choosing between two good designs or two good potential employees. As in any other difficult decision without a clear winning answer, it comes down to your gut. You have to trust your gut. If you feel good about the decision at the time you make it, then you are doing the best with what you have at the time and there is nothing wrong about that, it’s how you can move forward in life. It’s impossible to make the choice that is right in hindsight every time, but it is possible to make the best choice with the information you have, and to be happy you made it. Once a decision is made, be happy with it and deal with whatever comes next when it comes.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. In the context of a business, what exactly is “Disruption”?
For us, it’s breaking outside the status quo, specifically to improve something, not just “because”. Innovation creates disruption. While much of business is about stability, we focus on innovation and disruption because that is where everything new comes from. That is what our clients pay us to do. While disruption is sometimes thought of as bad, and other words like innovation is good, disruption to me is simply a consequence of rapid improvement.
How do you perceive the role of ‘disruption’ within your industry, and how have you personally embraced it? Is it a necessity, a strategy, or something else entirely in your view?
All the above! Disruption is necessary every day, it’s what makes the design industry exciting. I’ve embraced it fully. Disruption can be a “bad” word for some people, I think that it’s merely the outcome of fast innovation. We should always be looking for the next disruption and innovation, it’s what keeps people and companies at the top of their game. Even big companies, like Fortune 500, realize how valuable disruption is. They may “keep the status quo” as much as possible in one hand, but invest large budgets into R&D, which is basically paying to create innovation, and likely disruption.
What lessons have you learned from challenging conventional wisdom, and how have those lessons shaped your leadership style?
This one is hard. There’s always a lesson every time you challenge conventional wisdom. Sometimes it’s that the conventional wisdom is there for a really good reason. What I’ve learned, and I think it will hold, is that you need to be open to change. Always ask questions, always challenge the status quo, but also realize that sometimes a change that could be great, has too high a cost to implement right now. Timing is something you have to learn. Is the benefit worth the pain right now, or if you wait 6 months or a year or two, can you make the same change more easily? Especially when making company wide decisions, you have to know your team and listen to them. Know how much you can challenge conventional wisdom with them, without losing them.
Disruptive ideas often meet resistance. Could you describe a time when you faced significant pushback for a disruptive idea? How did you navigate the opposition, and what advice would you give to others in a similar situation?
When we first started pitching our Discovery process, basically forcing brands to go through the research to make sure their idea had the best chance of success, we were surprised to get pushback from a lot of people. Maybe it’s because they were used to other models of how design firms worked, or maybe it was us not fully being able to explain everything, we’ll probably never know. However, over time, we grew what was included in the Discovery process, got some great initial success, and when we could tell people we had 100% success in identifying a successful path forward for our clients and their IP, then the pushback went away. Now, we just have the usual reasons for not moving forward, like budget or culture miss-match, but we can’t be the perfect design firm for everyone.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Innovative Approaches We Are Using To Disrupt Our Industry”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1 . Integrated sustainability. In the world of physical products especially, sustainability is more and more expected by customers, to the point that sustainability isn’t just a feature anymore. Rather than trying to sell companies on sustainability, we are just doing it on every project, making sustainability standard and not an add-on for our clients without them having to worry about it.
2 . Conscious Design methodology absolutely helps us to stand out. There are many design firms out there, but few have co-authored an entire book on how their design thinking process works and laid it out for people. Building on the book, we have a podcast dedicated to highlighting companies who follow at least some of the Conscious Design pillars and gives people a way to peak behind the curtain and understand what we’re doing and why. The why is very important, especially for innovation that needs to stick.
3 . I’ve worked with and around design agencies for a while now, and the standard practice is to provide either a proposal for the entire project at either a cost plus model or over estimating to make sure you can handle what changes, or lowballing with lots of change orders that stack up. We have adopted, and now require on most projects, going through our proprietary Discovery process. This is true especially for new innovation projects. The goal is to identify all of the hurdles and potential blocks to a projects success first, present a few directions and their respective investments and potential results, and then pick a suitable direction to go into. This has cut down on revisions, prototype costs, etc. significantly for our clients with all the research we put into our Discoveries.
4 . End-to-end partnership, delivering innovation and commercialization. Many studios and agencies focus on a single part, or a few parts of the process of ideating a new concept and taking it to market. Especially for companies below enterprise, there is a huge need for the ability to keep the focus and what we call “single truth” of a product from innovation through commercialization. There are a ton of changes and inputs through the development process, and by having ownership from start to finish, we help ensure our clients’ products don’t lose their mission and focus through it and deliver what they may have been promising their customers from the beginning. Good innovation should be something you can commercialize, and by involving people earlier in the process and doing our Discovery process, we can deliver better results faster than others out there.
5 . Blending branding and product design is something not a lot of agencies do. There are some, and it would be wrong of me to claim to be the only ones, however I believe the approach of integrating branding with product development and innovation is a very important shift. While large brands who have massive value attached to their brand typically are very careful with brand and its intersection with products, medium and smaller brands often ignore this, and after a few products end up having losing the continuity between their products and their brand, which is never a good thing when it comes to commercializing a product and can make creating customer loyalty harder than it needs to be.
Looking back at your career, in what ways has being disruptive defined or redefined your path? What surprises have you encountered along the way?
I haven’t followed the typical college, job, work a long time, and retire path that most people do. I quit a very stable job to start my first agency at 25, something most designers my age would never have dreamed about doing especially hiring people with way more experience that myself. We set out to be an all-in-one agency, a model we hadn’t seen done before really, pitching ourselves as a “business in a box” for mostly product startups. The experience gained from that was invaluable, and ultimately led me to be the only partner who wanted to keep running a design agency, and founding Peterman Design Firm in 2017. Before we required discoveries, which have had some pushback oddly as I mentioned, I would see all kinds of projects fail from a ton of different reasons, but almost always could be tied back to some research that was skipped and the rate of success being much higher when I questioned things, sometimes leading to not working with some clients because we wouldn’t go a route we knew would fail. Changing to the Discovery process, we’ve now had a 100% success rate in creating a marketable product solution that would have positive margins. It’s been a huge change, and it’s why we require them now.
Beyond professional accomplishments, how has embracing disruption affected you on a personal level?
I honestly don’t know, because I’ve grown up and lived my entire life in the world of innovation and creating disruption. I’d love to say it’s made me a better parent and husband, and it’s the magic to my success, but for me, constant improvement is just part of my existence at this point. I believe change is always needed, everything can be improved, and if you wait for someone else to make the improvement, you won’t be able to guide it for maximum benefit.
In your role as a C-suite leader, driving innovation and embracing disruption, what thoughts or concerns keep you awake at night? How do these reflections guide your decisions and leadership?
While it’s best to never second guess a decision, even if you think it wrong later on, driving innovation and embracing disruption will inevitably lead you to question things all the time. Did I do that right? Could I have done that better? There’s always questions about how we can improve this process, can we automate something, and so on. I think the biggest thing I think about is how we can make our teams more efficient and deliver the best results possible. We’re constantly adding new things to our process to make sure we are taking advantage of the best technologies and solutions available. Sometimes it’s driven from customer feedback, sometimes it’s the internal team, but either way constant improvement is always on my mind.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I already have! I created the Conscious Design Haus to help make the circular economy beautiful and accessible. Creating a circular economy that’s human first I think is an important task, and one that designers are a perfect fit for being the agents of this change. The podcast, the book, me speaking on Conscious Design, partnering with Inside Fashion Design for their courses, and even speaking in front of congress members and teams is all to help bring awareness that this is the future we should have, and with the right support, designers can make it happen successfully.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find me pretty easily, a google search of Ian Peterman will pull me up. But if you want the quick route, the best options are ianpeterman.com, petermanfirm.com, or consciousdesignhaus.com. You’ll be able to see what I’m doing, find my podcast and book, and anything new I or my companies are doing.
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.
