| Product Ventures By Hal Brown The guy who designed your child's Crest toothbrush works in South Norwalk. Likewise, so do the designers of the new Cascade dishwashing liquid bottle and Schick's newest razor - to say nothing of the interior of the Gulfstream V private jet and the new Mr. Bubble bottle. They're all at Product Ventures Ltd. on Washington Street, an industrial design firm with a dozen or so employees. Once hardly anyone knew about industrial designers. Their contributions weren't part of the public's commercial consciousness. But products eventually shifted from the black iron boxes and boilers of the industrial age to more streamlined forms, and distinctive shapes like the Coca-Cola bottle emerged. Industrial design flowered in the 1930s and still is bearing fruit today. "I didn't know of this field until my father introduced it to me, and a lot of my friends had never heard of it," said Peter B. Clarke, the president and founder of Product Ventures. "Now, it's on the cover of Time magazine; it's one of the hottest fields around and for very good reason. We're going through another revolution, which is the digital or technological revolution. Again industrial design is making a difference, keeping up with technology and repackaging it into more ergonomically friendly forms. Phones are getting smaller and smaller, yet they need to fit in your hand, they need to be user-friendly. Industrial designers do all of that." Product Ventures' main niche is designing packaging for consumer products, although its employees have worked on everything from thimbles for surgeons to play easels for Fisher-Price. Clarke said the firm's goal is to make "ownable" designs for its clients, designs that can be patented and protected from copycat competitors. A patented shape "is extra leverage for our clients to protect their turf," Clarke said. "Especially with consumables and consumer products the brand message is extremely important because the chemical inside is an intangible; it's hard to really understand its value until you use it over a period of time. Our focus is on the form and structural package, the overall shape. We want to assist in helping to build that brand message and the loyalty behind these products. We will create a form that embodies a certain personality that a brand is positioned toward." To help Procter & Gamble Co. launch Dryel, a home dry-cleaning kit, Product Ventures designed a paperboard tub with a snap-on plastic lid and internal dividers that tell consumers how to use the product, supplanting the typical rectangular pasteboard box. "The value of us as an industrial design firm is we know so much about all the available cost-effective materials and processes. We could create a new package to give them the result they're looking for," Clarke said. The design process takes in a lot of elements, said Clarke. "It's a little bit of hand sketching, a little bit of mocking up quickly out of found parts, a little bit of sanding and sculpting out of foam, a little bit of precise cutting out of harder materials or utilizing state-of-the-art prototyping." Product Ventures can send a computer file to a prototyping firm and have a model grown in a vat of photosensitive resin and selectively hardened by lasers into a precise plastic form overnight. The same file can render photo-realistic images of the package or be sent to outside sources to run stress analyses or determine how plastics will flow in a mold. The file also can be used to program computer-controlled machining equipment, to cut a steel mold for the product. Clarke said the firm tries to balance the types of projects it takes on to avoid pigeonholing itself. "There's a good variety of things here - everything from consumer packaging to medical instruments and, in between, juvenile furniture, sporting goods equipment. The end benefit in any one client or any one category is we cross-fertilize our experience. Working with so many different manufacturers and manufacturing processes can benefit our clients who may have never tried that process." Clarke, who lives in Fairfield, grew up in Westport with a pencil in his hand - and probably a wrench in his back pocket. Coming from an artistic family -- his father is an artist and educator who coordinated the art program for the Fairfield Public Schools for more than 30 years, Clarke had been sketching since childhood. At the same time, he said, he was "a gadgeteer." "I built mini bikes. I could take things apart and put them back together. I had the mechanical aptitude and understanding as well. I was able to carve. I carved ducks and hand carved things. I could think three-dimensionally as well as hand sketch two-dimensionally. As you can see, in our discipline we communicate our thoughts through statues, through models, three-dimensional, as well as a sound mechanical understanding of how things work." After high school he joined the Marine Corps, playing in the U.S. Fleet Marine Corps Pacific Band, which he credits for instilling discipline and motivation into his professional life. Out of the service, Clarke went to the University of Bridgeport, where he visited the industrial design school. "They gave me a demonstration of the things that they do, and I said, 'Oh, my God, I love this.'" From there he went on to work for several industrial designers. Clarke started Product Ventures in 1994 when he saw "there was no formidable large industrial design consultancy between New York and Boston on the [Interstate] 95 corridor." "There was a real opportunity there. I also recognized that in New York City the zoning restrictions are such it's not possible to have a proper model shop in-house. I was able to do that here as well." And, he said, "there's a lot of top talent that normally would be commuting into New York from the suburbs here. Why not everybody stay here and have a better lifestyle rather than spending two hours each way on the train? We're just as close to the New York airports as Manhattan, which is great for our clients who are international and so on." The company started in the Saugatuck section of Westport and moved to South Norwalk in 1997. "After working in some of the top consulting offices in the New York area, I'm very proud of the fact that I was able to corral, convince and excite some the best guys and girls I've worked with to come work with me here," he said. Clarke said he alone isn't responsible for Product Ventures' success. "It's definitely not me - it's the team, it's the talent of everyone here. I could not do it by myself. We have people from Japan, Indonesia, Mexico City, Argentina, a lot of people from Cincinnati. I'm very, very proud of the team. We're trying to build the best industrial design firm in the world." |
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