Where were these wooden cars when i was a kid? I saw these at a small boutique toy store and while they are slightly expensive for a toy car, i think they are awesome and nearly bought myself one…i still might.
There is a crazy story about Patrick Calello (the designer behind Automoblox) that was told to me a couple of years ago. I can’t confirm if it is true or not, since the story has most likely been filtered through lots of people before reaching me.
One of the scariest moments for any product designer is actually following through to the manufacturing and production phase of their product. Especially if the product has a very limited budget, and end price point. And even more especially if producing that product in a foreign country. Months of mental sweating ensue.
When Patrick took his car designs to China to have them manufactured, he worked for an extended amount of time with one factory in particular. Every time they prototyped his designs, they came out wrong. How could that happen when detailed drawings are being supplied to the factory? This cycle continued on for months. Nothing but problems.
Somehow Calello met up with an Engineer, who just so happened to speak Mandarin. The Engineer traveled to China with Calello, and sat in on one of the meetings with the factory. However, the fact that he knew Mandarin was kept a secret.
After leaving the meeting, the Engineer turned to Calello and told him to sever the relationship with the factory entirely, and he would help him find a new factory.
It turns out the factory was intentionally making the prototypes wrong, in order to stall the designer while they produced and sold the designs and working product to other people. Talk about a nightmare.
Lesson learned.
Again, this was a story told to me a couple of years ago, so I’m not sure how accurate it is. But my point of sharing this story is to show what can go wrong. I wouldn’t recommend that any designer first run off to China (or any other country for that matter) to produce his/her product idea. You might be surprised to learn there are lots of possibilities for producing here in the US.
Folks, we INVENTED mass production and lots of other amazing things. Let’s continue…
Source: aodine
