Spotlight Archives - Page 6 of 7

A Q&A with Brand Strategy Expert Hannah June Lueptow

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers we admire, asking leaders in the field about their work and their design journey. In this interview, we spoke with brand strategist Hannah June Lueptow. As Head of Research & Strategy at Manyone NYC, Lueptow navigates the intersection of emerging technologies and consumer applications across global markets. Her work reflects a keen ability to translate complex research and insights into meaningful brand strategies.

Photo courtesy of Hannah June Lueptow.

A graduate of Pratt Institute, Lueptow’s design approach blends a deep knowledge of cultural behavior with strategic thinking. Her career has taken her across seven countries, conducting projects for clients such as Magic Leap, LG, Ford Motors, and Panasonic. At the same time, she channels her creative energy into Hannah June Design, her Brooklyn-based ceramic studio. Her contributions to the design industry have earned her a Red Dot Award, an iF Design Award, and recognition as a Core77 Design Award finalist, jury member, and an IDSA Design Award finalist. We asked Hannah about standing out in a competitive market, failing fast, and how we can all think more like brand strategists.

Q:

Can you give us a simple definition of brand strategy?

A:

Brand strategy is the heart and soul of what a brand is. It is truly the foundation of how you interact with the world. And I want to say the world—not just your customers or your end user—because it is about your core values. It is how you engage with your own team, with your creative process. It’s about your approach to business and the world, and the change that you want to make in the world. That means it’s all the more critical that you define what that strategy is, so that everyone can know about who you are, what you represent, and what you can offer, and people can either buy in or opt out of that. It’s about who you, as a brand, are in the most authentic sense.

Q:

What are some common misconceptions about brand strategy that you’ve encountered?

A:

Sometimes people think that brand strategy is just what something looks like; what the font you use, the color palette, and that sort of thing. But that is the least of what I do. I’m an industrial designer by trade, and now I’m on the design, research, and strategy side of things. When we talk about brand strategy, it’s about that initial positioning in the market. It’s not just, What’s our roadmap? How are we making money? It’s a lot more emotionally driven than that, more like, Why are we doing what we’re doing? What is the meaning behind that? How can we make sure that that is felt at every touch point in our process, from discovery to purchase to last use to disposal? What is that full cycle? Where are the opportunities to reach people in meaningful ways? That to me is the strategy. It can be a mindset. It can be a product. It can be messaging.

When we think about brand strategy in 2025 and beyond, it is omni-channel. It is an ecosystem. It can no longer be only product-centric. We are in a product world, so it needs to be about this bigger vibe.

Q:

Your philosophy emphasizes failing quickly and iterating efficiently. How do you do this?

A:

I think it changes almost every day. I feel like a broken record saying this, but AI has really helped me fail faster and more efficiently. What we learn in design school is, Make your pretty perfect thing, and make sure it’s absolutely perfect before you put it in front of anybody or put it on the market. I think that’s a really dangerous approach. As a researcher, all I want is to put dirty, messy things in the market so that people can react to them, and then you get customer feedback. At the end of the day, you’re always building for that customer. If you put something too polished in front of them, they’re not going to be honest with you about it. At that point, you’ve gone really far down a single path on a single bet.

A lot of strategy is doing your due diligence and understanding the market, testing a lot of different things. You take the scientific approach of having a hypothesis, putting it in the market quickly, getting those reactions, and then adapting the outcome. You want a customer-driven solution that continues to change, because customers change. Our world moves so fast. What you liked last week is different from what you like today. I don’t think people are loyal to brands anymore. I don’t think people should be loyal to brands anymore. What have brands given us? I want, as a consumer, to be able to explore and have fun and push brands to continue innovating. Fail fast, fail often, push things into the market, iterate quickly—that’s how you stay competitive, that’s how you stay innovative, and that’s how you stay exciting and have fun as a brand as well. That’s where those magic bits really happen.

There are a lot of examples of companies that have gotten far too comfortable, thinking that they have dominated a market and that their customers will be loyal to them—Xerox is one—and they become these giants that can’t shift efficiently or quickly enough. They get lazy, they get complicit, and then a startup swoops in and takes their market share, because what consumers want is something that benefits them. So you just can’t get too comfortable. You always need to remember that the customer is your client.

Q:

You worked with Interwoven Design on the Evan Adaptive brand strategy and identity, tell me about that experience.

A:

I came in at the very beginning, and that’s my favorite moment of working with startups; when they have this great idea but they don’t really know how to position it or message it yet. Very early on we started with these three questions: What does the world need? What can I offer? Why does it matter? Just those three questions kicked off an amazing workshop session.

Interwoven Design worked with Hannah June Lueptow on an adaptive lingerie line for Even Adaptive.

We conducted that workshop with Even Adaptive to start aligning on their vision and their values, and to make sure that those became a foundation for the very exciting stage of visualizing and then designing these products and services. What my role really was—sometimes I joke that I host a lot of therapy sessions with entrepreneurs—was to get them in the room and ask those hard questions. You make them make choices. It’s really easy to say, We’re going to be the Uber of fill-in-the-blank. That’s okay, but what does that really mean? Why is Uber different from their competitors? Once they start thinking about their own brand in that context, it facilitates really interesting discussions. A tool I love to use is looking across different spectrums. So, Are we playful or are we serious? Where do we fall on that? It’s not to say we can’t be both, but we need to create that initial alignment on where we’re going because we do need to have a cohesive brand and consistent messaging. I think that was my core role; helping to be that therapist and understand what our message needed to be. Then I was able to come in and start talking about different visual and verbal positionings that we could take.

Q:

What were the key elements that IW developed for the client?

A:

Rebeccah’s team were the experts at prototyping and soft goods, and I would say I did pretty much everything other than that. I ensured that we were creating a brand that could carry the beautiful products that were being designed by the industrial designers on the team. We started with a lot of mood boards to identify the visual direction. Those informed the font and the type face, which informed the logo and the logotype. We played with the different logos and logotypes to create an emblem for them. That also led to color palettes, hang tag designs, and visual and verbal universes; How do we talk? What type of adjectives and language do we use? What is our form of communication? That was paired with the visual, What is our visual communication? What does our Instagram look like? Are we serious? Are we clean? All of that was packaged into a single brand book that was handed off to Even Adaptive to be able to then move into a photo shoot. Rebeccah and the team facilitated that photo shoot and it looked absolutely amazing. The book also helped to build the website and start implementing the visual assets that I helped define.

Q:

What are some of the elements that were used to position the brand to emphasize adaptability and inclusivity?

A:

It started with those questions I mentioned before, determining how we wanted to frame the story. Everyone should be inclusive, in my mind. That is not always the case, but I think that, in our ideal world, that’s a given now. I really wanted to push that messaging. Is it magical that we’re adaptive or is it empowering that we’re adaptive? You can already start to see how different tensions and imagery comes to mind depending on what you choose. It’s not to say that both of those can’t be extremely inclusive and adaptive creative paths, but it starts to transform the way you think about it.

I came up with a lot of different adjectives that allowed us to share this idea of adaptability and inclusiveness and empowerment but frame them in slightly different perspectives. Then we went into a work session with the team where we had some examples of copy and imagery that would tie very nicely into that interpretation of adaptability, and they shared their favorite elements. I think it’s typical for clients to respond to a mix of the options. They like this about this and that about that, and you gradually funnel down into the final creative territory.

Q:

How do you see adaptability and inclusivity shaping the product design market?

A:

We live in such a chaotic world. Right now what I’m seeing a lot in the inclusivity space is being very sensitive to over stimulation. I think that is very hot and needed in the market, How can we be inclusive within our environments? How do we create spaces that are inclusive? I’m seeing more energy go into that rather than into physical products, especially for the elderly population. There’s a lot of disposable income in those markets, and it’s also completely underserved.

I was joking with a co-worker this morning, saying that the silver lining I see with Ozempic is that at least people are paying attention to women over 50 now, and showing that people are living extremely successful, fulfilled, amazing, active lifestyles. We tend to forget about that. As innovators, I think we are conditioned to look at the generation below us. What’s Gen Alpha doing? But if we’re thinking about inclusive design, we shouldn’t only be looking at the younger generation. Actually, it’s much more exciting and challenging to look at, Who’s older than we are? What has been done already? There’s a lot more opportunity in underserved markets, and that’s where I get really excited.

Q:

With so many products on the market, how can a brand stand out?

A:

I think the answer is to be a little messy right now. Intentionally be messy. I think there are two factors.

One is that I believe the millennial brand is dying. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I think that came about with the rise of Instagram; the trend of hyper curation and everything looking perfectly in place. It was a very aspirational lifestyle. I know I just said don’t only focus on the younger generation and here I am talking about what the younger generation is doing but, if you look at how Gen Z approaches social media and their life, it’s messy. I think that is the type of authenticity that people are craving right now. That’s one facet of it.

The other facet is AI everything. We’re seeing such trash AI art and whatnot on the internet. And I already said that I love AI. I use it every day. It’s an amazing tool, but it is a tool. It is not the end outcome. There’s so much AI infiltrating our digital spaces, and I think there’s fatigue coming from that. Where I see these converging is a need for messy, authentic humanness. What does it mean to be human and not the polished, perfect, AI version of a brand? I think we’re craving that messiness. The more that brands can not try and follow trends, not try and hop on an algorithm, and just own the niche and the space that they’re in, people will find them. That’s the beauty of the era of the internet that we’re living in right now; the people who identify with you will find you, but you have to deeply know who you are and own that and articulate it well. And that’s why you need good brand strategists.

I think people are exhausted, honestly. We’re seeing a lot of no-buy 2025 trends. People are sick of constantly being fed stuff that they’re being told they need in order to keep up with the expectations of society. Brands that adapt to that and accept the not-perfectness of the world that we live in, that’s what feels real. That’s what I think people want. People want real.

Q:

As someone who has been both a jury member and a finalist for design awards, what do you think sets award-winning design strategy apart from the rest?

A:

The bar is really low. I participate in a lot of design awards and juries, and I tell applicants to show process, show thinking. Anyone, especially in this age of AI, can make a pretty product. That is the baseline at this point. I want to know why it looks like that, what decisions you made along the way, and what impacted those decisions. And so we go back to the need to fail fast and fail often. I want to see how many times you failed. I want to see all the different versions that this design went through to get to this outcome because, at the end of the day, I’m judging on thinking and process and methodology, not on the render.

Q:

You’ve conducted strategic research in many countries. How do cultural behaviors influence global design strategy?

A:

Humans are so different, and culture is such an important and fascinating aspect of how we engage with the people, the products and the environments that we use. That, to me, is what is so amazing about customer experience design. You need to be tuned into all of these elements. How do people engage with the products they use? How do those products then interact with the environment that you’re in, and then also with the people that are in that environment as well? When I do international research, it is often with US-based companies that have a product or a technology that is already well established in the US market and they want to expand into an emerging market. Luckily, a lot of these clients recognize that there are unique behaviors and circumstances in other countries that we can’t anticipate.

For instance, I was working with Ford on a car that would be sold in the US but produced in Brazil and India. There was a new scratch-resistant coating that Ford wanted to put on the car, and it was kind of pricey. My initial approach was to question the value. It doesn’t actually protect against dents, even though that was the original pitch. But it turned out to be the highest rated feature for this potential car. And why? Because there are a lot of stray dogs in India and they like to sleep on the top of cars at night, because they’re warm from the sun. The dogs stay warm, but they also accidentally scratch the paint on your car.

Being able to tell rich stories like that is the power of doing international research and the importance of doing research anywhere. I’m working with a massive client right now that touches all of our lives and they don’t talk to customers. Or, they talk to customers but only to their fanboys. They talk to people who are advocates, hero users, and they think that they’re getting great feedback. And of course they are, because those users won’t ever tell you it’s bad. Those people love you. But how are you going to build into new markets if you’re not actually understanding the users who are in those markets? So I think it applies everywhere and to every company, no matter what market you’re researching.

Qualitative research is especially important. We have so much quant data floating around right now. We are all aggregating data at an insane rate, we barely even know what to do with all that data. But who’s actually talking to people? How do you tap into the emotional drivers behind things? Why are we actually choosing the things that we do? A lot of the time it takes sitting down with someone for an hour or two to really get into that nitty-gritty and understand that. There is so much untapped value that companies could gain from sitting down and talking face to face with customers.

Q:

Can you share an example where research led to a major shift in brand positioning or product design?

A:

I was working on a consumer-facing tech product. I had done a ton of research and created a product roadmap for them along with a list of what this product needed to include. We call the key features hero moments. This is a term I love to use because it’s not just a feature. It’s more than a feature. What’s the thing that you tell your best friend about when you use something? That’s a potential hero moment. We defined what the hero moments of this product should be by talking to the core target user. OK, jump ahead to three months later. I’m completely uninvolved at this point. The engineers are working on these things in China with the client, and they realize that putting Bluetooth and this other sensor in it will increase the cost significantly. But they also realized they needed those features, because that’s what would enable the hero moment. They saw from the research that their product would have significantly less value to the end user if it did not include that hero moment, and their decision became very easy. Sure, our product’s going to be more expensive and we are going to now target a higher income market for this product. We also understand that if we don’t include this feature that will make it significantly more expensive, the product will lose all value.

That was a really exciting moment for me. This was a client that did not value research at the beginning of our engagement but—through working with us and through seeing these insights that were very actionable in the design process—they became evangelists of qualitative research in their own process, and referenced our work months in the future. Listen to your users!

Q:

How do you see brand strategy evolving in the next 5–10 years, especially with advancements in technology and AI?

A:

AI is making everything faster. What’s exciting is that we have a lot more resources to fail fast. It’s so much easier to get to something tangible, and maybe it’s not refined or thought out, but you can get something that is visual enough to get an initial reaction. What I hope and believe for brand strategy is that we are going to see a huge divergence in creative thinking and creativity.

The negative side is that potentially everything converges and starts looking like AI. But I think if designers and creatives and strategists use AI as a tool, things will open up and be a lot more creative, a lot more unique, and a lot more personalized. The future of successful brands is taking a strategic approach to personalization with their users. We already have niche brands and products and user groups, but I think we’re going to see the 2.0 of personalization because they’re going to be understanding our data in deeper ways. It’s our job as brand strategists to help these companies understand how to use that data in a way that isn’t creepy but brings value to the user in new ways.

Fifteen years ago, it was transformational to us that we could get two day shipping with Amazon Prime and anything could be on our doorstep. Today, I can call a car to my house with my phone. That was insane 10 years ago. Now it’s just what convenience looks like. I think we need to start exploring what that next level of convenience and personalization will look like powered by data and AI.

Q:

If you could give one piece of advice to designers looking to transition into strategic roles, what would it be?

A:

First of all, get into strategy. There’s no wrong way to do it. Strategy is what gives designers a seat at the table. Often, we, as designers, don’t think we deserve that or don’t think it’s our place. We design the thing and that’s it. But if you’re a strategist, you are thinking about the business as well. We are used to thinking about the product, and of course it’s important to think about the customer, which is a lot of what I’ve been saying here. I think the next layer is thinking about business implications, return on investment, and potential impact. The first step into strategy can just be thinking about the impact of a product or a service that goes beyond the core interaction. How does it work with the bigger ecosystem of offerings that this company has? How does this grow into the future? What does it evolve into? What additional benefits or services could spin off of this idea? Thinking about impact and value, that’s thinking like a strategist. You start thinking like a founder or a business person might think.

—

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A Q&A with Packaging Designer Loreta Haaker

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers we admire, asking leaders in the field about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with industrial designer and packaging design expert Loreta Haaker. From Lima to New York, Haaker has carved a distinctive path in the world of design, blending ingenuity with poetic storytelling. Her work—spanning furniture, soft goods, packaging, and food design—reflects a deep connection to her Peruvian roots, childhood memories, and the real as well as the magical elements of Latin American culture.

portrait of industrial designer Loreta Haaker — *Photo courtesy of Loreta Haaker.*

A graduate of Pratt Institute and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Loreta’s design philosophy fuses contemporary trends with an intuitive sense of materiality and form. Her approach is both precise and playful, crafting objects that evoke powerful experiences. Recognized early in her career as one of Cosas Design magazine’s top emerging designers, her work has since been showcased in Lima, Milan, Miami, and New York. We know all about Loreta’s talent here at Interwoven Design as she works on our social media team, creating the fantastic graphics you see on all our platforms, especially Instagram! We asked her about the collaboration between graphic packaging design and structural packaging design, where she sees innovation in the market, and where she looks for inspiration.

Q:

How did you get into packaging design?

A:

My journey into packaging design began in 2018 with a role as an industrial designer specializing in structural packaging at Ammunition, a leading design studio in California. Their Brooklyn studio in DUMBO focused exclusively on packaging, making it the perfect environment to dive in.

There, I learned that packaging design isn’t just about protection—it’s about the experience. I explored how packaging could extend the product’s story, incorporating innovation and sustainability. I soaked up every bit of knowledge I could. You have a preview of what packaging design is like at school, but it’s way more than you expect. That was my first experience, that was the first time I heard the term ‘structural packaging.’ It involves engineering because there are constraints around capacity and dimensions. If you just hear ‘packaging designer’, it might mean either graphics or structure, or both. Usually an industrial designer will call themselves the structural packaging designer, which is everything that’s not the graphics.

Later, in 2021, I began consulting for a beauty and cosmetics company in Peru. Over the past three years, I’ve worked on diverse packaging solutions: glass fragrance bottles, plastic makeup containers, and limited-edition cardboard boxes. Structural packaging design involves close collaboration with engineers, as factory production requires meeting technical specifications and restrictions.

Q:

You are part of the IW design team but you work remotely from Peru—could you tell us how that came about?

A:

Yes, I started with Interwoven Design right after graduating from the MID program at Pratt. I worked full-time during the summer of 2017. After that, I stayed in touch, collaborating on projects in New York on different occasions between 2018 and 2020. Since 2021, I’ve been working with IW remotely as a freelancer, and it’s incredible to think it’s been almost seven years since I first joined the team! The story actually began even earlier, in 2016, when I took Rebeccah’s Soft Goods class at Pratt. It was my first real exploration into soft materials and sewing, and it turned out to be one of the most memorable and impactful electives I’ve ever taken. She was doing a lot of technology components with other students in my class but I’m not that techie, so for me it was a perfect start in soft goods. I really like products made of fabric. That project was super interesting for me because I had never worked on a soft goods project before, even though I did my undergrad in ID.

I got my master’s in design at Pratt because the field had expanded so much around 3D printing and technology for prototyping between 2010 and 2020. After that semester, I partnered with Interwoven Design on a soft goods project, then it was in the summer and I stayed involved, working on different projects. At that point it was mostly conception or research. When I started working remotely, we already had a strong relationship.

After my master’s degree and after the pandemic, it was easier to work remotely. I could take advantage of that flexibility and be home [in Peru] while staying in touch with my clients. So that was great: that I could be back home but still have the rush of working in a global market in New York.

Q:

What are some of the other types of work you do?

A:

As an industrial designer, my skills range from design thinking and concept development to hands-on exploration and making. While I’ve become a bit of a packaging expert—creating out-of-the-box experiences for consumer products—I’m always open to new opportunities and projects.

The fields I’ve explored include furniture, soft goods, accessories, food design, beauty and cosmetics, structural packaging, and product photography. I do a lot of cosmetics and beauty packaging. I don’t know why but I started getting a lot of clients who need packaging. I think packaging is something that moves a lot. Many of the branding companies I work with don’t have an in-house structural designer, and that caught my attention. I realized that I could offer structural packaging to different design studios. Some people call structural packaging secondary packaging, while primary will be something that touches the product. Then secondary packaging would be the box around the primary container.

Q:

Your Advent Calendar project won an award at the Latin America Design Awards last year. Could you tell us about it?

A:

esika Advent Calendar structural packaging design by Loreta Haaker — *ésika Advent Calendar*

Yes! It was a holiday unboxing experience for the beauty brand ésika—a limited-edition Advent Calendar. I was the structural packaging designer lead and collaborated with graphic designer Sandra Lanfranco. She added all the vibrant colors and finishing touches to the project. It was an advent calendar in the shape of a 5-sided Christmas tree that unfolded into a 360 degree display with 25 beauty products inside.

We had a lot of freedom because a calendar isn’t a traditional product, the packaging silhouette isn’t predetermined. We decided to play around with the shape, asking, How it could be a box without being a box? The only thing we needed to keep in mind was that we had to have 25 items and 25 ways to open it to access those items. Besides that it could be whatever you wanted. We were thinking about how we could make it a more contemporary structure, something that could display or be unboxed in different ways that could surprise you or give you a different feeling when you open it. Maybe it comes flat, and as you open it becomes a 3D structure.

esika Advent Calendar structural detail — *ésika Advent Calendar* *detail*

We made a lot of mockups, small ones. We realized we could fit a lot of sections if we thought about a 360 degree shape with pockets all around. As we were breaking down 25, we thought 5 sides would make sense. We wanted it to be so beautiful that you would want to leave it standing even once it was empty, and bring it out every Christmas. When you work together with the graphic designers, the concept is so much better, and the process invites more innovation. That really helped the strength of the project as a competition submission. We also created a mini version with three sides, each highlighting a best-selling beauty product.

The project was recognized by the Latin America Design Awards 2024 in Brazil and the Pentawards 2024 in London, earning bronze in both competitions for Brand Identity and Connected Packaging. This was my first time submitting a packaging project, and receiving this recognition was such an honor!

Q:

You do both industrial and graphic design. How do you integrate structural and graphic elements in packaging?

A:

I do both, but my graphic skills are more intuitive—a way to communicate and reinforce ideas. While I don’t have formal training in graphic design, I’ve always had a strong visual sense and a love for it. For larger or more complex projects, I collaborate with graphic experts to co-create the best results.

Here’s how I see the relationship:

Structural packaging is the blueprint: it ensures the product is protected, functional, and user-friendly. Structural packaging offers protection for transport and display, functionality and ease of use, efficiency for display and logistics, and sustainability in materials and recyclability.

Graphic design gives the package its personality. It helps products stand out, communicate key benefits, and build emotional connections. Graphic design attracts attention, establishes brand identity, communicates product benefits, evokes emotions, and builds loyalty.

For me, a successful package seamlessly combines both elements. It’s vital to consider structural and graphic design together from the very start.

Q:

How does that collaboration go if you are working with a graphic design team?

A:

For the advent calendar project we were on a team together from the beginning. We decided, Okay let’s prioritize the structure, the visual 3D form, and then we’ll work on the graphics. We did do that, but that whole time I was in conversation with the graphic designers, showing them my work. They started creating graphic design moodboards around my early ideas, and ideating alongside me even though the design isn’t finalized. That’s one way to do it.

Another example is a project for a jewelry designer client of mine, a sculptor who’s doing jewelry. I was designing boxes for her. She already had her branding, her logo, and things like that. She had the vision of what she wanted and then I asked, What’s the best way to apply that graphic content, that is already developed, to new packaging? I’m thinking about her brand: she’s working with her clients all the time. I thought we could do something artistic, like an origami box that could unfold flat so she could hand draw on it. Then on the other side would be the logo and business information. She was an artist and she sketches like crazy, so that was one of my suggestions, We could use a super nice paper, we won’t add any glue, and then why not try to draw on it to personalize it and see what happens? I finalized the project with that idea for future personalization, and now I see those personalized boxes on her Instagram, whenever she has a special item she creates this beautiful artwork on the packaging and it’s exactly how I envisioned it. It’s so amazing.

Loreta Haaker Quote Design isn't just about protection - it'a about the experience.

Another way to work with graphic designers is through brand agencies that decide, Okay let’s go full circle with this rebrand. I was working with an agency that was doing a rebrand for a bakery. They said, Let’s create a new look and feel, and we definitely need packaging because we want to stand out. For bakeries, everything looks the same, on the market. Everything looks the same. In this case we were looking for something super minimalistic. I had a small brief for the project, so the look and feel was already kind of set. They didn’t know how they wanted the packaging to look but they knew how they wanted it to feel. I was creating a system of packaging, where each size has a different purpose. I was thinking about the proportions that would make sense. The tiny one is a perfect square. The second one will be the same height but twice as wide. The third and fourth would be proportionally related, scaling up. There was a look and feel but I had a lot of freedom around the dimensions. They already had a logo, so we played around with the best way to apply that logo, and the best colors. There were requirements in place, and the packaging needed to look good with the assets they already had. I went back and forth with the graphic designers to make sure that all of the elements were harmonious. If the teams are too independent, you can get graphic and structural designs that don’t look good with each other.

Q:

What role does unboxing play in your design considerations?

A:

Unboxing is one of the most exciting aspects of packaging design. It’s the moment when the user interacts with the product for the first time, and it sets the tone for their overall experience. I always aim to make this process smooth and enjoyable, elevating the product inside. There’s something special about unboxing—whether it’s the anticipation or the reveal—and I always keep that emotional connection in mind.

Q:

How do you test the functionality and durability of your packaging designs?

A:

The process starts with mock-ups to test basic concepts and usability. Afterward, prototypes are created for more detailed evaluations. On a larger scale, an engineering team often steps in to conduct rigorous tests on materials and structural performance, ensuring the packaging meets all functional requirements.

One of the biggest challenges today is addressing the environmental impact of packaging. Designers must be mindful of reducing waste, avoiding single-use plastics, and eliminating excessive materials.

To tackle this, I focus on sustainability by selecting eco-friendly alternatives and exploring innovative designs that optimize efficiency. It’s about finding solutions that balance creativity, functionality, and environmental responsibility.

Q:

Where are you seeing innovation in the market? What role does sustainability play?

A:

Absolutely! I’m particularly inspired by the increasing use of biodegradable and renewable materials. Plant-based options are becoming more common—they’re not only environmentally friendly but also have a forward-thinking aesthetic that resonates with modern consumers.

Examples of sustainable innovations include materials designed to disappear, such as algae-based solutions, from seaweed, and naturally grown packaging like mycelium, from mushrooms. These solutions represent a significant shift towards sustainability and demonstrate how nature-inspired designs can shape the future of packaging.

Q:

How do you approach the design process for packaging compared to consumer products or furniture?

A:

The process is largely the same: research, ideation, conceptualization, exploration, design development, 3D modeling, technical drawings, and prototyping.

What’s different with packaging is the need to consider the product it contains. I typically receive a brand brief from the client and technical specifications from engineers. From there, I create mood boards and develop concepts that connect the product and its packaging in a cohesive way. Everything starts with research. Research everywhere. The farther from your starting point, the better. Take the bakery packaging example, I had seen a lot of different packaging solutions that are not related to bakeries, for example cosmetics, but there can be a nice relationship between the two. For beauty there is a lot of harmony with science, so cross-pollinating can work well. One idea for future development that I suggested for the bakery packaging was an external element, I pulled out some beautiful off-white shoelaces I had and tied it onto the smallest box. It made these tiny beautiful desserts feel special. They weren’t sure about it but they really loved the idea.

Q:

Where do you look for inspiration?

How to Wrap 5 Eggs Book Cover — *How to Wrap Five Eggs by Hideyuki Oka*

A:

Inspiration is everywhere, especially in everyday objects. Recently, I noticed a minimalist packaging solution at a bakery—a chocolate bear box with a locking detail shaped like a little bow. It was such a small touch but made all the difference.

I also find inspiration in books. My favorite is the “Packaged for Life” series published by Victionary, which celebrates packaging that brings joy to daily life. I own the Coffee & Tea, Scent, and Chocolate editions. Chocolate is my favorite!

Another book I treasure is How to Wrap Five Eggs: Traditional Japanese Packaging by by Hideyuki Oka. It’s a stunning exploration of natural materials and traditional craft techniques, and it’s a constant reminder of the beauty in simplicity.

For me, nature is the ultimate source of inspiration. Spending time outdoors helps me reset and sparks new ideas. When I find something particularly special, I capture it with my instant camera and keep it as a memento—these snapshots often become seeds for creative exploration later on.

—

A Q&A with Design Storytelling Expert Tad Toulis

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers we admire, asking leaders in the field about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with VP of design at Sonos and veteran storyteller Tad Toulis. With a career spanning over two decades at the intersection of design, strategy, and innovation, Toulis has built a reputation as a leader who shapes design teams and creative cultures within some of the most influential consumer electronics companies.

portrait of Tad Toulis industrial designer — *Photo courtesy of Tad Toulis.*

As Vice President of Design at Sonos, Toulis has spent over a decade evolving the brand’s in-house design practice, expanding its influence across industrial design, user experience, and strategic partnerships. Toulis has also held key design leadership roles at Teague, Samsung, Motorola, and Lunar Design. His early work as a Fulbright Scholar underscores his deep curiosity about materials and manufacturing—a theme that has informed his approach to product innovation ever since. We asked him about the key elements of a compelling product story, fostering a culture of storytelling, and the influence of AI on design storytelling.

Q:

What are some key elements of a compelling product story?

A:

Whether it’s movies, books, or any medium, there’s a question of how simple the story is, how easy to comprehend. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be simplistic, but when you’re talking to users or even talking across your own organization, there’s a lot of benefit to simplicity and clarity. Anything that gets too complicated or too nuanced can get lost working across groups of people and can get lost in the transmission in the marketplace to the consumer.

You’ve probably heard the phrase—it’s very common in consumer electronics—don’t ship the org, which is essentially shorthand for, Don’t let the structure of your organization and the ways that may negatively impact internal communication and collaboration evidence in your product. But it can happen. Brand marketing can be very strong on certain pillars, and then you have to ask, Is the product actually living up to the marketing?

At one point at Sonos I had a very close collaboration with our chief brand officer, and we shared the same story. She was really really focused on product being the origin point of the story and I was pretty savvy about understanding how product can tell story. It was a really good collaboration for a couple of years but then she left and then I saw the story slip into, We sell speakers. It became flatter, there wasn’t a bigger story than selling speakers. She came from a background of culture marketing and culture brand building and had done tours at Patagonia, so she took on this task that she called, You’re better than this. It was meant to help people understand how their listening had deteriorated in a world of digital abundance. For example: your phone in a cup as an amplifier. It’ll work, but you can probably get better sound. Another example is that one of the technologies that Sonos competes against is Bluetooth, which is very easy to use. That ease is very powerful but, because of the way Bluetooth works, when you get an inbound call, the music gets disrupted. When you get a text message, the music gets disrupted. So the way she synthesized that was with a bigger story of: You, as a user, are better than this. You deserve more out of your music listening than this space of constant tradeoffs.

Her point was that there’s a more powerful story here than selling speakers. It’s the understanding that music is invigorating. One can say it’s part of the life force that we all share, and so her point was, You may not realize it but you have, by degrees, ended up in a very marginalized experience by leveraging this technology, Bluetooth, which our product competes with by using Wi-Fi, which can give you a more robust audio experience because it’s not impacted by inbound calls and text messages and things of that nature.

Q:

How do you balance functional design with emotional storytelling?

A:

You need both. If it’s too much story and not enough function, that’s no good. If it’s too much function and not enough story, that can also not be good. I mean, to be fair, there are some products that operate in a fairly straightforward space where they’re very functional products and they probably don’t need very complex stories. I think the thing is, working in the spaces I’ve worked in with interaction design, user research, packaging, this is a multifaceted process and to coordinate all those pieces you need good stories.

An example of a story I can give you that rode right through that intersection was one of the first things I took on at Sonos. We had what we called the signature detail. This was when we first introduced touch control onto our devices. Because the nature of our product was multi-orientational, all of the activity on the product was happening in the same place: dead center. That’s also where the tweeter wants to be on our speaker. Tweeters are extremely touchy, they don’t like anything in their way. We wanted to put the brand there because we were putting these touch controls there, and we were using the brand mark as a way to identify where to touch. This created a collision course between what design wanted to achieve, what brand wanted to achieve, and what audio wanted to achieve. The way we moved through that story was to actually reference the Sonos word mark, which is a palindrome, and say, Look, you can read it front to back and you can read back to front. It’s a great distillation of the flexibility of the system, which allows you to orient it however you want.

I created a small movie that I made in Keynote and pushed out to the organization to help them understand that the intent here was not to hurt sound. The intent was to demonstrate flexibility. The key visual we used was the Lego system: very simple elements that are recombinable in any number of ways. I’ve found, over the course of my career, that things like that—campaigning, holding open houses, using user research—are ways to engage the company in a conversation. You have some core stories that you’re constantly returning to and adding depth to. Our story was, Simple things constructed in unexpected ways that behave in ways you’ve never experienced. Each of those pieces was built by a bet. Simple things was about manufacturing structure. How we make them simple things. Constructed in unexpected ways was a bet on tooling and investment in machining. That behave in ways you’ve never experienced was about user experience. All of those pieces became the baseline for what we did in design. Internal campaigning, open houses, and videos are extremely valuable tools for getting people to participate in the story that you’re building.

Q:

How do you foster a culture of storytelling within a cross-functional design team?

A:

The interesting thing with cross-functional teams is that they’re kind of, in miniature, the same as the organization. You have these cross-functional tribes, and you need all of them to be coordinated to deliver the product. So, in my time at Sonos, I held an offsite around this theme. Just because we’re all designers doesn’t mean we’re all working the same way. It’s design, but design has multiple languages that are participating, especially in a cross-functional team. When I came to Sonos, user research was really beta testing. You would build a product, you would get it into the hands of users, and you would test it. But we weren’t as sure-footed in qualitative user research. One of the things I really pushed was bringing qualitative user research into the design organization and making sure that the people we hired in those roles were good storytellers. Because if the research isn’t accessed, it isn’t going to fuel the product, it isn’t going to help make good decisions. We needed to find user researchers who were comfortable with storytelling. The other thing we did is hold internal design reviews and cross-functional staff meetings, and the center pole of many of those sessions was a case study. We would ask members of the team to prepare a story to share at the staff meeting to stress test their skill set in storytelling, so they were doing it in a safe environment with friendlies before we took it out to the org.

Q:

How has your approach to leading design teams evolved throughout your career?

A:

When you start, you think you’re being promoted to a leadership position because you have something. Maybe you do. But that can also reinforce bad behaviors, and I would say the first several years, when I found myself leading people, I was responding to some pretty bad managers I had had. What is the antithesis of what I observed? How would I not create that environment? Over time it was more about control. You think, I know how to do it. They’re giving me this responsibility because I know how to get things done. But as you spend more and more time managing wider and wider groups of people, especially from outside your discipline, you have to develop other strategies and a much deeper toolkit. For me, the toolkit became more about meeting people where they are. Everyone I have to manage, I have to learn how they operate, because they receive information differently and so forth. So as I’ve worked on broader problems, more complex problems with skill sets I don’t possess, what I’ve learned is to meet people where they are.

Really great leadership and management is about small adjustments. You give the team a common story to work against so they can have ownership and can be invested in what you’re trying to achieve. Whenever you have to do a big intervention, probably something has gone wrong. And sometimes you do have to do a big intervention. Really great management across cross-functional teams meet people where they are and understand how to talk many languages to many people, but do that in a way that’s coherent enough that it still adds up to something bigger. It can’t be a different story for each person that doesn’t seem to go to a common destination. You try to get to a place where your management is small interventions, light tweaks, taps. Then people show up with more enthusiasm and energy because they’re invested and not feeling micromanaged or heavily managed because people don’t really do great work in that environment.

Q:

What role does storytelling play in shaping how users interact with and perceive a product?

Sonos Speaker white and gray — *The Sonos Play1 Compact Wireless Speaker*

A:

In cases where it’s used effectively, I think it can have a huge impact on how users approach the product. My background has predominantly been in consumer electronics, and I’ve been in that industry for quite a long time. I think story can go a long way to helping consumers approach products but—I will be honest with you—more and more I see a handful of dominant stories that aren’t very imaginative, like convenience and innovation. I think stories can do a lot to help users orient around the product as long as they reflect what has actually been pursued in the product development process. If they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily manifest clearly in the product. I think it’s really dependent on the category you’re working in and how faithfully you’ve stuck to a coherent story.

Marketing has a role to play but there are some very dominant stories, at least in my sector, and I think they aren’t actively managed anymore. They’re just used as shorthand to get people to get excited about the product. They’re not actually meaningful stories.

Q:

How have consumer expectations around design and product storytelling changed over the years?

A:

Speaking from the consumer electronic space, which is a very particular field, there was a period of time when it was going really well. Now I feel like we’ve fallen into this trap of innovation, intelligence, and convenience. These are very big stories that are constantly reinforced, and I think most of them are in the service of convenience, which I don’t think is intrinsically a good thing. I think it can lead to a very passive user experience. Storytelling is still there but I feel like there are a couple of dominant stories in my industry that keep getting attention and therefore are at risk of crowding out other stories and other voices that want to bring something else to the table. The momentum of a couple of big players in consumer electronics really dominate the story, and they dominate these narratives of convenience, intelligence, innovation.

I’ve bounced between agency life and in-house life, and the best period of my in-house life is when the teams are smaller, when you’re in more of a startup mode and the team is small. When I look outside, one of the things I see is that there are a lot of organizations that do really powerful work because their scale is such that it’s easy to communicate up and down the communication chain. In the case of startups, everybody joins for the mission. They’ve already self-identified as interested in that thing. A great company I always look at is Teenage Engineering, they do niche audio products. They are a certain scale that allows them to have a lot of control, and everyone in that group is very dedicated to what they’re putting out there in the world.

As a company scales, and you get larger and larger, you bring in career professionals from other places who bring their ways of operating to the table. The challenge is that they may not be responding to what the company’s actually about. So you get, This is how we do it at company A. This is how we do it at company B. Unless you’re really paying attention, your company ends up being a compendium of these different operating styles. And it goes back to the story. They don’t all have the same story, where they can say, This is our common story. This is how we pursue things. This is what we’re in the service of. Unless you’re really mindful and grooming things, then inevitably you’re going to get a lot of noise in the system, and that noise will dull the efficacy of the story and the clarity of what you’re putting out there. Whether it’s the product itself, the marketing that supports it, or the way the brand is supporting it, those things start to get murky when you’re not paying attention to how consistently people are drawing from the same common story.

Q:

What role does sustainability play in the way brands tell stories through design?

A:

There’s been a lot of good advancement in sustainability. The challenge with sustainability in my sector is that consumer electronics are a pretty synthetic world. It’s funny because when I started at Sonos, people ask, Should we make an enclosure out of this organic material? And the answer is that you can but, by the time it’s shippable, you’ve done so many treatments to it that it’s no longer truly organic material. We’ve all heard the term greenwashing, right? Going back to consumers, a story that’s been really popular is trying to appeal to people’s values by how you position the product, and sustainability is certainly one of those stories. Some companies practice it very, very well, and some companies practice it nominally. The most impact will come from regulation. A supply chain is such a complicated animal. There are so many twists and turns, and by the time a company subcontracts out to another company, their practices may not always be aligned with the subcontractor. Things have definitely improved, I just don’t know if they’re improving at a rate of speed that’s going to have a significant impact on everything we’re seeing come to fruition right now.

Q:

With the rise of smart technology and AI, how do you see product storytelling evolving in the future?

A:

This one worries me a little bit over the near term, because if AI is essentially an ingest of all our stories, then invariably it’s subject to the same tensions of who tells the stories, what are the dominant stories, what are the voices telling those stories? Just like history is written by the victors, right? If you were to ingest 100,000 articles about product development in consumer electronics and you did a word cloud, stories of innovation, intelligence, and convenience would come up far more than others. I think, over the near term, we’re going to get more of that. The stories will trend towards those spaces. The question I am concerned about is, How do more marginalized stories and more marginalized voices get expression? There’s always this tension in whether those stories will make it to the market and make it at scale. I think they can make it to scale right now in smaller activities but I’d love to see those voices operating at the same scale as the dominant stories.

Q:

What advice would you give to designers looking to incorporate storytelling into their work?

A:

My general advice, which I would give to anybody going into design, is to seek out your authentic self and invest in who you are. I feel like there’s always been a subset of great design and a lot of good design. Maybe when I was younger there was a lot of bad design and a subset of good design, but I feel like we’ve gotten to this place where it’s fairly stable. There’s a small percentage of truly great design, there’s a lot of good design, and maybe not as much truly bad design.

Going back to stories, a lot of people are ingesting the same inputs and creating similar things. I always encourage people to know what you’re about, know what your values are, know how you express them in your work, and then get smart about how you articulate them and advocate for them. Talent serves you, to a point, but can you express your ideas? Can you debate with other people? Can you simplify what you’re trying to achieve into a sound bite, so that busy people in an organization can get it? I think the most important thing is for people to own their story, and figure out how to workshop it. The best success comes from really getting in tune with what you bring to the table that’s unique to you, and then becoming very good at deploying that when you’re interacting with others.

Q:

Could you share some books, talks, or resources that have influenced your thinking on design and storytelling?

A:

One book I’ve recommended forever is Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, who’s one of the key founders of Pixar. The central thesis is that story is everything in their work. Before they commit to building something out, before they make the movie, they really try to get the story right. Story is, to some extent, cheap to develop, but everything is predicated on the story so, if the story doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how much time and money they spend animating and rendering it. They’re maniacally focused on getting the right story in place. I think it’s an important lesson; that you’ve got to get the foundation right because, once you start building on top of it and making decisions—business decisions, investment decisions—it’ll escalate quickly, and it could be escalating on a weak foundation.

Another book that I have also recommended to a lot of people and bought for leadership is Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I used it a lot and have an earmarked, annotated copy. What impressed me about the book was just how important it is to be clear about your basic goal. It encourages you to get to the basics in your thinking: I want to achieve this outcome. What do I need to do to achieve that outcome? What is stuff I’m being asked to do that doesn’t help me achieve that outcome? How can I get that off my plate? It also encourages you to say no to things.When you put these books cheek to jowl, they’re basically asking you to develop a better practice of asking, What’s important to achieving our goal? What is a story that mirrors or reinforces the essence of what we’re trying to achieve and doesn’t distract from it?

—

A Q&A with Medical Design Consultant Yukiko Naoi

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers we admire, asking leaders in the field about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with medical design consultant and acupuncturist Yukiko Naoi.

Yukiko’s journey bridges the worlds of design, medicine, and wellness. With a foundation in acupuncture and Chinese medicine combined with degrees in interior design and industrial design, Yukiko has spent over a decade designing innovative medical devices, diagnostics, and consumer products as long time partner and president of TKDG, Tanaka Kapec Design Group. Her hands-on experience with medical precision rekindled her passion for acupuncture, leading her to found her clinic, Rest NYC. From working with children battling cancer at Columbia University Medical Center to exploring the healing power of group dynamics in community clinics, Yukiko’s work reflects a holistic approach to health, design, and the interconnectedness of human experiences. She is also a long-time friend of Interwoven, and has collaborated with us on a number of medical design projects. We asked her about the challenges of medical design, getting feedback from stakeholders in the design process, and how her dual roles of acupuncturist and medical design consultant influence one another.

Q:

Why is medical design different from other types of industrial design? And what are some of the unique challenges you face when designing for the healthcare industry?

A:

I’m going to be really honest. To tell you what is truly unique about medical design, I would have to know everything else. I’d have to know aviation design and everything. Let’s think about designing an airplane or a helicopter—that must be just as complicated. I can’t definitively say that medical design is unique, so I’ll just talk about how I see it compared to some more general products.

Even when you say medical design it could mean different classes of products. It could mean consumer products or it could mean products only used by doctors, where there’s a different level of product development.

In general, there are more regulations and requirements. There are requirements for manufacturing and materials, and multiple rounds of approval for those materials. Toys are similar. Those are the obvious challenges that are somewhat unique to medical design; regulatory requirements as well as the involvement of the insurance agencies. Whatever product that you’re designing has to work with that system of patients, healthcare providers, and insurance companies. The insurance companies can come in at the very early stages of the project. Let’s say you are designing something that focuses on the patient but the doctor is going to be the one pitching the emerging technology to the patient. This puts the doctor in a certain position of power, but at the same time they need the insurance company’s approval so that insurance will pay. Let’s say it’s a diagnostic device. They need to have some sort of system of checks and balances in place so the doctors have a certain level of power, but not so much power that the insurance companies wouldn’t approve it.

Many medical companies have in-house consultants; doctors, nurses, techs, and even insurance consultants. All of a sudden, your scope could change. You might realize that you need another step in place to make sure that there’s an opportunity for doctors to share their input before the final outcome or to account for how they manage data or patient information. As designers, we are trying to make everyone happy.

Then there is an enormous amount of people in the healthcare industry who have nothing to do with the insurance company. They get the product in place or in the doctor’s hand or they clean the product or store the product, and that’s their everyday life. We always try to include those people to really make the whole process smooth. The ultimate goal is to have better outcomes; to provide the best health care that you possibly can while eliminating human error and maximizing efficiency and all that good stuff. The new trend is patients getting more power. Of course we include patients in our research as well.

Q:

Medical designs have multiple users from the patients to the doctors and the other medical professionals who use it to the hospitals or clinics that invest in the product. How do you ensure your designs satisfy the needs of all of these groups?

A:

There is a harsh element to this, which is about where the money comes from. The clients provided the money to solve this issue, and we need to satisfy them. Then there’s the receiving side, the target user for the product. They should have the same goal, but those sides don’t always have the same priorities. Not every project results in the best of the best for everyone. So there’s the harsh side of budgets and time constraints, and there’s the super soft side—that this is a product that humans will touch and feel and live with. Our goal is to make a bridge between the two so that no one is overlooked. It’s not always easy.

Q:

How do you gather and incorporate feedback from end-users, such as patients and healthcare providers, during the design process?

A:

We often shadow medical professionals so we can really understand their roles and know what to bring to their attention. There’s a little void that we need to fill because the product has to work at every stage, and as designers we’re often the only ones who see every stage of a product. Good clients would give us the time and budget to really understand the beginning and the end of the life cycle of each product; where material comes in, where it’s going to be made, how it’s going to be packaged, how it’s going to be shipped, the carbon footprint, and all that stuff. It makes for better design but also each stage costs money, and a lot of clients are interested in saving a penny wherever possible. We’re talking about millions of whatever product you design. It’s ultimately more successful to consider all of these details in product development.

It’s important for us to observe as well as interview stakeholders. People aren’t necessarily aware of what they do, it’s second nature to them so they don’t think about it. They have standard tasks they repeat over and over, nurses are a great example but this happens in all kinds of medical roles. They do tasks, and if you ask them about it they say…whatever they think they’re doing, This is better. I want this. I’m doing this. But the reality may not be the same. It’s interesting to see their perception of what they’re doing, and that is valuable information, but they’re working with the existing system, so they may not be able to see what we can do for them. What they say could be very different from what they’re doing. It’s powerful to hear their words as well as to see their environment and how they work in it.

Ideally we hear from stakeholders with all levels of income, to hear from a huge, well-funded hospital in Texas and also to hear from the one person clinic. They may be doing the same procedure but in a very different environment, and to understand both is important. Location is important also, or real estate. Some users have more room, some have very little. A Manhattan clinic is tiny. The same goes for patients. We want to see people with huge families and small families, we want to see a wide range of age differences and body types. One product should be able to go to all those places and work at an optimal level.

Q:

How do you address the need for balancing functionality, safety, and aesthetics in your designs?

A:

As a designer, I think aesthetics is a given. This is why we’re designers instead of being engineers or marketing experts. Of course everything is a collaboration because there are engineers, salespeople, manufacturers…I think we have to trust ourselves to know that aesthetics is just what we do. It’s in our blood, it’s in everything we do, without thinking. Then just try to design an honest, elegant solution. We are like aesthetic ambassadors. I’m glad that a lot of medical companies value that, and I think there is a demand for aesthetically appealing products from patients and doctors as well, they don’t want to live with not so nice things.

Q:

What considerations go into designing products that need to withstand rigorous use and sanitation protocols?

A:

There are two main options, and they are complete opposites. One is a reusable medical product, and one is a disposable product. Many medical devices are disposable because of the danger of cross-contamination. That comes with challenges around material use and environmental impact.

Certainly we can play a huge role in selecting better optimal materials and considering the environment issues. A lot of companies are under pressure to show environmental accountability. On the other side are the reusable products that go through a sterilization process. There are always trusted, well-established systems for sterilization; protocols and procedures that people are reluctant to change because of the risk involved. It depends on the area of medical design as well. Orthopedic surgery instruments are usually reusable but it depends on the cost, because hospitals are businesses, and if they see that a sterilization process costs more than disposable products, they may decide to get rid of the sterilization process just because it’s not efficient or not profitable enough.

The sterilization process itself is its own area of medical product design. I’ve done a little work in that area, just enough to understand how complex it is. The sterilization process is done by a human. There is a machine, but there is a human working the machine, and you have to keep it sterile. There is some automation, but that space between the human and the automated machine is a great opportunity for industrial design.

It’s always fun for us to look at the options and push the envelope a little bit, to consider new materials and processes, but in the medical field anything new has to go through an extensive and expensive approval process. It feels like it really comes down to money: whether or not there is a company or a government entity that’s willing to fund the project. I have to say, in this huge, wealthy country there are enough people to do that, and that’s how good things come to the market.

Q:

You’ve worked with Interwoven on a number of projects, including the Breg CrossRunner Soft Knee Brace. Could you talk about some of the challenges of that project and how the team addressed them?

A:

This was a proper industrial design project. The challenge at the beginning of the product exploration, once the discovery was in place and we understood our parameters, was to mix the hard and soft materials on the body. We have to consider three elements; the human body, the soft goods and the hard parts, and we’re trying to integrate them to create a new combination of all three. That part was really fun. And again there was the aesthetic ambassador part, because we wanted people to want to wear this product, and for them to find it easy and comfortable to wear. It was quite successful.

Q:

On top of being an Industrial Designer, you are also an acupuncturist and have an active acupuncture practice. Has acupuncture informed your medical design work? How do they influence one another?

A:

At one point in my career, I got a little disheartened with the design industry because of all these things that we just talked about, the frustration with the money-making industry, proof that it’s a for profit industry, nobody’s doing it for free. It’s ideal if designers can make money and help people, that’s the ultimate goal, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. I was discouraged, thinking, What’s the point? Sometimes I felt that the industry was operating with priorities that were different from mine. I thought, Okay, I’m just going to do more hands-on things to help people. I wanted to fix things. That’s what designers do: problem-solving mindset.

So I went into this hands-on phase, working with people individually, which was when I started doing acupuncture. It was amazing because I had the perspective of working with a huge company and a huge budget, able to impact thousands of people, and this was the opposite, and I really got to appreciate both ends of the industry. I also did a post-graduate internship at the Columbia hospital in their pediatric oncology department, and got to see how the hospital worked from the inside. I learned a lot and everyday I interacted with patients. You learn a lot by touching people, and that was a huge influence.

Q:

What medical design trends or emerging technologies excite you most right now? How do you see the medical design field evolving over the next ten years?

A:

The undeniable trends are AI, wearable technology, and companion apps. I have mixed feelings about the direction the trends are heading, part excitement and part fear. AI has the potential to revolutionize diagnostics, improve accuracy, and reduce human error. Wearables and apps are empowering patients to take more control of their health. This empowering of the patient is exciting! The medical design field is moving toward more patient-centered designs, with devices getting smaller, smarter, and more seamlessly integrated into daily life.

Sustainability should be important, and I want to believe that society can push for more eco-conscious materials and manufacturing practices. The growing trend of wellness and preventative care, outside reacting to diseases and conditions, empowers people to stay healthier and more engaged in managing their well-being. This feels like a logical direction to focus on. We call it “healthcare” because we are caring for people’s health.

–

A Q&A with Visionary Entrepreneur Stephanie Benedetto

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with Stephanie Benedetto, the attorney-turned-fintech entrepreneur and visionary founder of Queen of Raw, the company that created Materia MX, a groundbreaking excess inventory management software. Stephanie is on a mission to make fashion more sustainable by tackling one of the industry’s most persistent problems: waste. Her platform leverages blockchain technology to connect brands, retailers, and factories in a cloud-based marketplace where unused textiles, once destined for landfills, can be sold to new buyers. Her company has already saved over a billion gallons of water— enough to provide clean drinking water for 1.43 million people for three years—and has turned the concept of a circular economy into a profitable and scalable business model. Stephanie’s approach is not only about reducing environmental impact but also about transforming the industry’s supply and demand dynamics to benefit people, the planet, and profits. We asked her about how she was inspired to start the company, the challenges along the way, how the platform works, and how she measures impact.

Q: What was the turning point when you realized the extent of the waste in the fashion industry, and how did this inspire the creation of Queen of Raw?

A: Before Queen of Raw I was a Wall Street attorney, but I ended up specializing in fashion, technology and sustainability. And then the market crashed in 2008, and we were seeing the height of waste and greed and excess around the world. I took that as my opportunity to go out on my own. I always wanted to go build a business and change the world and I had a prior startup before Queen of Raw, which was called Paper No. 9. My co-founder and I had invented a new leather alternative and it was truly unlike any other leather alternative I had ever seen out in the market. As we were building that business, we would go to all these companies and brands and manufacturers around the world, and they would be buying this new innovative sustainable leather alternative from us. But we would go to the warehouses and see all this perfectly good stuff just sitting there, and we’d ask them, It’s great, you’re buying this from us, but what are you doing with all that stuff? And they said, Nothing, I’m going to landfill it, or burn it. That just seemed amazing. I was proud of what we were doing but we were still making something new. So that became this bigger problem that I really dove in early on and wanted to tackle head on: what could we do with all that perfectly good stuff?

When we started trying to solve it, the next step was trying to figure out how much stuff like that is out there. We did a survey. We sent it around to a couple thousand companies and manufacturers. It was a one question survey: How much do you have in excess inventory every year? And some numbers were lower, some numbers were higher, but the average was fifteen percent. Fifteen percent of every single step of every production run ended up as waste. It was crazy. Some were as high as thirty percent. Some claimed it to be as low as six to nine percent, but the clear average was fifteen percent. And at that point, when we started looking at those numbers, we knew this was a huge opportunity.

Stephanie Benedetto NASDAQ feature — *Photo courtesy of Stephanie Benedetto.*

Q: How did you know you had a great idea on your hands? At what point did you know that this business could be profitable?

A: When we were just starting to look at the market and validate the idea, it was 2013, 2014. There was a lot of amazing work happening with companies like Thread Up, Poshmark, Depop, and the RealReal. I loved what they were doing. It was the hottest market, and it’s still growing, but at the time they all were dealing in one unit at a time finished goods. Don’t get me wrong, every unit matters, and for finished goods that matters. But that led me to ask, What about all this other excess in inventory and supply chains? What about all the regular stuff; all the fabrics and trims and some finished goods, too, but the business to business stuff? And nobody seemed to be paying attention to that side.

The thesis was that if we could solve that up-the-chain waste for businesses, maybe that could help inform and support all the downstream supply chain waste. That’s when we started to see that this was a huge opportunity, and we started with the low hanging fruit. We had to test it, so we put up a marketplace. We barely even had a product to sell, but we had this point of view that a B2B resale marketplace for raw materials was a huge opportunity and we posted the site. The first few SKUs were actually our Paper No. 9 sustainable leather excess fabric. People started coming to the site like crazy, asking questions and looking for more. We saw the demand and we knew we had a real opportunity.

We want buyers and sellers who are participating in the circular economy and buying and selling with each other to recoup all the value with each other. Making money on materials is not our business model. We sell SAS software subscription fees to companies. They pay us annual membership fees to be a part of our platform and to use a whole suite of tools, and that’s it. All the reuse, resale, recycling, and donation happens on our platform. Everyone gets the best prices for participating in the network.

Q: You’ve been at the head of Queen of Raw for many years now. What challenges did you encounter along the way, especially early on?

A: We were early to the market for sure. We would go knock on doors in the fashion district, talking about this problem. And the world was not where it is today, we got plenty of doors slammed in our faces. But all it took was two. We had two early adopters: Marc Jacobson and Kering. They keyed in early on and believed in what we were doing and saw that there was an economic and an environmental opportunity here. All you need is one or two early adopters to really believe and then you can grow from there; get the case studies, get the learnings, and keep doing it. So, fortunately, some of those slammed doors have since turned into clients, but we had to find those early believers and keep pushing forward.

Q: How has your personal journey shaped your vision for Queen of Raw?

A: It’s why I do what I do. I had my first child right as I was starting to get the company out there, and the moment I had my eldest son, Jacob, right at that moment, I knew we were on to something. When your kid is born, it’s not about your life anymore. It’s about your children’s life and their children’s life and future generations. You want to do everything you can to ensure that that life is going to be a positive one. We had to build for this future. I want my kids to have clean water to drink, clothes that aren’t toxic to the earth, a planet to live on, and I think that’s what inspires me every single day. Early on as a working mom I was pushing the stroller in the New York City streets, and there was all this noise because it’s New York. I remember hearing something coming out of the stroller, he was four five at the time. I leaned into the stroller to hear what he was saying and I heard, Are you naked right now? You’re not. You’re using fabric. It’s everywhere, it’s polluting your water. I mean, he was literally doing my 60 second pitch! And on the one hand I’m thinking, I’ve been pushing this stroller and doing this damn pitch way too many times! But then I laughed and thought, You know what? If my five year old can get it, anyone can get it.

Stephanie Benedetto - Queen of Raw — *Photo courtesy of Stephanie Benedetto.*

Q: What’s the most surprising material or fabric you’ve seen saved from waste through Queen of Raw?

A: You’re not just getting a fabric when you deal with clothing and fabrics. There’s plastic and paper packaging around it, there are hang tags, there are labels, there is metal on the zippers, there are trims. There are all these other commodities and materials involved. So, although we got known for our work in textiles, we realized very quickly that our platform could also handle finished goods, trims, metals, packaging, and so on. We’ve grown in those verticals and categories into food and beverage and CPG [Consumer Packaged Goods] and other industries. Now in food and beverage we have hops and flavors from Anheuser-Busch and other things I never imagined when we started.

Working in fashion is amazing and it’s powerful. But I wondered what it would look like if companies could cross industries and leverage each other’s resources. Textiles are used in everything; car interiors, carpets. How do we get industries across industries to participate in these kinds of exchanges? That definitely got me excited, just to see what was possible. We’ve done some amazing work with Ralph Lauren, with Nike, with Cotopaxi, with Victoria’s Secret. These companies are participating and they’re selling, but they’re also buying and making incredible products while saving a lot of water, chemicals, carbon emissions, and waste while doing it.

Q: Can you discuss the role that technology and innovation play in making this all possible?

A: Our CTO always had this view of platforms and systems-baked thinking. We can create the coolest technology in the world, we can use machine learning and blockchain and all the buzzwords but it still needs to make sense. We use this cool technology to deliver a good business result. You need to have platforms to facilitate, to make it quick and easy to participate and to have a network and a community that trusts and is willing to participate while incentivizing everyone to act. That kind of point of view is embodied in the platform that we’ve created. Yes, it’s great technology. Yes, we want everyone to be able to participate in the circular economy while also making it fun to do so. At the end of the day, we just wanted to deliver a kickass result and save a lot of time, money, and resources for everyone.

Q: Could you walk us through how a typical transaction works on Queen of Raw?

A: Once we’ve done our work with the sellers and we have centralized in one place all the excess they have with clean images and clear product histories, and we know what is available to sell, then it’s about matching it to the greatest buyers in the world who want what this company has. As a buyer, when you log into our portal, it’s in the cloud. You don’t need to download anything. You don’t need to integrate. You login and, like any good software, you have your own private dashboard, which starts to learn based on your actions. What kind of volume are you looking for? What materials? Where are you in the world? The platform analyzes it and brings you the inventory that you want to see. And the beauty as a buyer is that this is not just a marketplace where you want to buy and click a button. You want to swatch something, you want to sample it, you want to produce it, you may want to reorder it. We manage that entire process but out of excess and deadstock. Our platform is a full suite of tools to help you do that.

Q: Can anyone shop your platform?

A: Yes, we have two versions. If you just want to see what we have and buy, we’ve got a freemium version for anyone to participate, especially at a smaller volume. If you do need the swatching, the sampling, all the data, all the procurement tools, we have kind of pay to play structure at different price points based on how big you are to be very fair and to cover our needs.

Q: What do you see influencing decisions about material selection? Are you seeing more of a shift toward the use of sustainable materials?

A: I use “circular economy” as opposed to “sustainability” because we talk about why we’re doing things for people and the planet, but it has to also be about the economy. If it does not make economic sense, why would a company adopt your solution? And we’ve said that since day one. The reason companies come to us is not just about sustainability. You get great stuff at a discount where you need it. The fact that it has a sustainable story to tell is a value add but that doesn’t have to be the only decision. That’s been what we spend a lot of time showing; the time, money, and resources saved by doing this will also doing good. And if you can say it’s a win-win, then how can they say no to that? Consumer demands and regulations are all supporting this move to sustainable materials and procurement, but they also need to deal with what’s there right now. Our hot and most searched fibers right now are cotton and polyester, but the fact that it’s dead stock means that you can cut down on your consumption of new polyester by using what’s already been made: deadstock polyester. So it’s a great way to fill out your portfolio sustainably while also saving money.

Q: How do you measure the water and environmental savings for businesses? Could you talk about why this focus is so important?

A: There are a lot of tools out there. I’m sure you’ve seen LCAs, Life Cycle Analyses, and other tools that say that they are measuring and reporting tools. What we found is that there was not a good methodology for excess and deadstock. It’s one thing if you’re making it from scratch and you can measure every step, but how do we think about excess and deadstock? We spent over two years with MIT, which is an investor in our company. MIT gave us a team of data scientists and we researched the hell out of this to come up with a methodology to measure the water, chemicals, the carbon emissions, and the waste that is avoided and offset by you rescuing this material instead of making new material. That’s what we’re measuring. So we can verify what the material is, what it’s made of, where it comes from, and who it ships to. And based on those touch points, we use our methodology and we measure and report. It’s been fully audited by Deloitte and other auditors so it is an accepted methodology, and we did it because we had to be specific.This is about excess inventory kept in circulation and what is avoided and offset by doing that.

We tied a lot to water because we felt like everybody talks about carbon emissions and waste, but in the volumes we’re dealing with—it’s trillions of dollars worth of waste and metric tonnage—people don’t understand those numbers. But everybody understood a clean glass of water to drink. So orienting it to water was relatable. By some accounts the textile industry is the number two polluter of clean water globally. Oil and agriculture are number one, which of course fashion contributes to it as well, but textile production at the current pace is number two. But we love seeing the flip side of that. The flip side is that fashion and textiles can solve the world’s water crisis if we rethink how we do things at scale. That’s why we’re here.

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