As designers we are underselling ourselves.
Part of a series on Is Good Design Good For Business?
Robert Brunner is a designer who you might not have heard of. He worked at Apple where he actually hired Jony Ive. He jokes that on his gravestone it will say “the man who hired Jony Ive”. While at Apple he founded the Industrial Design Group, and designed products that laid the foundations for things like the iMac which are still huge successes today. After leaving Apple he was a partner at Pentagram, and has worked with Adobe, Beats by Dre, Barnes & Noble, Polaroid, Square and many others.
Recently he has founded a company called Ammunition. Ammunition is a Product Design consultancy with a twist. Brunner thinks we as designers undersell ourselves, consultancies normally design products for a company and then hand them over to be sold and marketed. In other words, they are usually involved right up until the point the product becomes profitable. Brunner thinks this is a bad business model both for designers and businesses. And so while they do still design products for companies under a similar model to a traditional consultancy, about half Ammunition’s work now is partnering with the companies. They partner so they are invested in their company, they are their company. Their profits are Ammunitions, and their losses too.
The most high profile partnership of Ammunitions has been Beats headphones. They designed every aspect of it, the branding, the packaging, the product. The whole experience of the company. And they were invested in the products success because, well, they were invested in the product.
When working with at Apple and other big, seriously design driven businesses, Robert saw the importance of Product Design for success. How it needs to be a priority all the way through the company. Design is important at every stage of your business. Brunner says your brand is not your logo, it’s the gut feeling people get when they think about your company. It’s not a veneer you apply to the surface of a product. And so every single thing needs to be designed and considered. The whole experience at every point of interaction.
“Your brand lives in your customer’s heart. You can only influence it.”
Your products are still central though. You must design everything around the product, but the product is king. After all that’s the best way to reinforce your brand. The products you design are the point of interaction between you and your users. Often people think adverts, posters or even things like logos are the interaction between business and customer. But no, really it is the product.
And so while this business model is better for us as designers, because it often works out that we get a bigger pay cheque (Ammunition must be rolling in it after Apple bought Beats), it’s also better for business because they get the whole experience holistically designed. And what’s more it is designed by people who are personally invested in the product’s success. Who want it to do well.
And so it often does. This model is great for consultancies because it’s hard for them to replicate the huge design-driven culture of places like Apple, and Braun when Dieter Rams worked there. Where designer and entrepreneur work side by side and have a close relationship right at the top of the company.
