:But I don’t want to do it that way…

February 5th, 2012 | No Comments » |

Over the weekend, and the past week actually, I have been back doing the fun part of making stuff - designing. Since we rekindled Lab-Gear back in late ’07, I have been working on and off with designing some carry goods (bags etc.) to add to the line.

Of course with the ever increasing dearth of such product on the market, there has to be a point of difference, otherwise there is little point; why just do what everyone else is doing, right? The point of difference I had decided originally was going to revolve around materials and price. Materials, I aimed to use only leather for all the reasons that leather is great. Price, well, leather is a premium material and as such attracts a premium price. Rightly so too but I wanted to do leather AND be cost effective/competitive with Cordura based products.

Now that is a challenge.

With a challenge like this one has to break a design down far beyond its base parts and drill down into the ‘how’, the ‘thinking’, of a product. From there you reassemble it from the ground up to see where, if possible, such criteria can be met.

A certain comfort can be found in the thought that after putting a design to rest for some time, when coming at it again with a blank slate ( ie. the original design sketches were not pulled out) you realise that you the conclusion you have just arrived at, is the same as that of the first time you had a go. To me that means that the best solution has really been found, so working at it again is just flogging a dead horse. That’s good news as all the previous prep I had done can now be pulled out and used in anger!

Close but no cigar though.

Anyone will tell you that the only way to put leather goods together is to sew. For the most part it’s true, I mean, that’s just the way it’s been done. I had identified some time back though that if the designs were to meet the base criteria, then reassessing this notion was at the top of the list; in Australia, good machinists are damn expensive and expensive labour + expensive materials = expensive product. Fail.

Complacency is a dangerous, progress halting trait.

‘But that’s the way it’s done’. That’s a phrase any designer has run into any number of times in the course of their job. Working with bike frame design for example, you run into this all the time, especially in Taiwan. I have a flat head due to the number of times I’ve slapped it because I’ve told that, when very clearly there were better, more effective ways to achieve the same thing. For Lab-Gear products, this is not a good enough reason (Lab-Gear would not exist if we had that mentality) and I was then, and remain now, determined to find another way to make the designs and in doing so, break that most frustrating of mentalities.

So for the past year, on and off, finding assembly option B, C and D has been the focus of the project. More frustrating than interesting, as often you come close only to discover that ‘close’ is the same as peering over a chasm to the other side!

While the designing is done, I like what we have, and some samples have been put together with the results on mark for the most part, the question of assembly is still a niggling one and has really has had me thinking very tangentially of late - trolling through other industries I have had experience with to find a solution. When people sometimes ask why some seemingly simple products are expensive, I can tell you that it’s not the physical product that’s being paid for but the ‘back room’ work where the value lies. This easily explains why Apple is so rampant when it comes to protecting what it does (yes, Samsung can fuck off because for the most part, all they have done is rip off the iPad - they might have a different OS and physical size, and even some technical features may be better, but they did not do the hard yards to ‘create’ their tablet, they just ripped one off).

But while I have several solutions now for the assembly process I am still looking for ‘that something better’. Each I have works effectively but in turn is not the solution I want, this is where the hard and somewhat tedious yards come to play. Phone calls, emails and web browsing are the intangible cost of design and even though I am so close, with the designs done and proven, without the ‘best solution’ for assembly the project remains at a stand still.

But it’s close, so close I can smell it. Some calls and emails just this morning might have put me onto this project’s holy grail. If it turns out to be true, and works, within a month Lab-Gear will have a nice little line of premium leather carry solutions but at a way less than a premium price. If not, the trudging shall continue.

 

Tags:design,outside the box

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