Unexpected places your designs have shown up

Just saw one of the griddles i worked on show up in a recent episode of Modern Family.

nice!

I was touring Bell’s Brewery a few weeks ago (my first tour in their new expanded facility) and after sitting in a room full of chairs my friend Nicolai designed, we headed next door and walked up a set of stairs and stumble across a table that I designed the base of.

I find youtube unboxing videos of products we have designed strangely satisfying :slight_smile:

Michael, do you get any push back on the inclusion of the machine screws on the face to hold in the baffles, like on that Polk center channel unit? Or is it an established design element by now, that doesn’t get scrutinized?

Actually we have never done it like this before. Typically we hide this kind of thing, or minimize it with smaller trim rings and tonal hardware. Looking at who the demo is for this range and what else he values in his life we thought it was an opportunity to celebrate the construction. They also act as magnetic anchors to the grille. Typically the grilled have these “catch cups”, basically press fit receptacles and pins. I firkin hate those visually. Just a mess and I felt we could do it better. I think this really sets our mid tier product off nicely at a glance. The entry level line, T Series, has the traditional catch cups. Our best line, LSiM, has all hidden magnetics, almost no detail on the baffle. This is the nice midpoint of doing something that feels high end but celebrating how we achieved it.

One of my buddies drove up in a vintage Porsche 911 that had a set of Polk speakers I designed installed in the doors. When I posted an image on Facebook, David over at Zelectric Motors​ sent me an image of the same model speaker installed in his restored and electrified VW Bug! These are exactly the kinds of cars I designed this series for. Vintage cars and trucks that had little in the way of factory systems at the time. Almost everything else in this category is overly aggressive or blinged out. We wanted to do something for the vintage car enthusiast building a resto-mod. That user wants something a little more subtle but still with some great detailing. It is so important to understand your user an not just chase your competition blindly. Image below showing both installs with my original rough sketch on the left.

The Inventcor sports bottles I work on as a product designer have shown up in Netflix series such as Breaking Bad and I believe also in Santa Clarita Diet.

Nice Yo!

Love the vintage feel. Are these 6.5"? (I couldn’t see them on the Polk site)

I don’t think it is available anymore. I did that line 5 years ago. We replaced it with DB+ and MM1. But it was available in pretty much every size imaginable, including ovals and subs.

Most people install them under the factory grilles of course, with newer cars anyway. The only cars that typically keep the grilles we designed are older ones.
1.jpeg
2.jpeg
3.jpeg

got my daily email from pinterest showing boards I might like… with one of my own sketches highlighted… yes I will like that pin as a matter of fact :laughing:

that is awesome :wink:

Do the sales actually go up after featuring a product on big screen or Netflix? I don’t mean the obviously marketed stuff; but the thing that have bee mentioned in this thread, like sneakers and heaters.

i would say it depends on how it is highlighted… and the value or emphasis placed on the product placement. i.e the heater - not a chance in hell the sales went up :wink:

I know when I was doing work for Chantal Cookware back in the late 90’s early 2000’s they had paid for their tea kettles to be on the stove of almost every sitcom kitchen… it is very difficult to quantify that sort of thing. In that case it was very systematic and had a weekly viewing, so perhaps it sunk in when they saw that kettle at the local Williams-Sonoma… but it was a different world then. Viewership is so fragmented now and it is hard to predict what is going to be the next big Netflix show. Once a show blows up the costs get high obviously. You need to catch it early the way Under Armour did with Friday Night Lights. That by the way is one of the best product placements I’ve ever seen.

… I know this stuff is impactful to retail buyers who you can go in and say “you may have seen this product in such and such”.

Smaller brands can do really well with webisodes, even youtube sponsorships. My friends at Autodromo http://www.autodromo.com used to sponsor all of the video content for https://petrolicious.com Great brand alignment. On the flip, Movement watches sponsors a lot of the video content for Donut Media and it feels way too forced. There doesn’t seem to be an alignment between the brands.

Fisherman’s Wharf, SF. McGraw Edison floodlights I did while at Cooper Lighting way back in '98. Image from GoogleMaps today. Ha.

I heard an interview with Mike Judge (Office Space) where he discussed the red Swingline stapler. Apparently, they just spray painted a black stapler for the movie, because it would show up better on film. Swingline didn’t make one. However, after the film attained cult status, Swingline got so many random calls from people asking for “the red Swingline” that they decided to make one!

I guess it makes a difference, but it’s hard to know in advance.

That is hilarious. I’ve never heard that story before.

Watched a 2017 movie tonight on Amazon called “Magellan”. It’s set in the near future - the astronaut lands on the moon Titan and opens up his briefcase-looking tool kit and there’s my B&D PD600 screwdriver from 2006, all done up in flat white. That was a trick little tool that we designed to do a bit of everything and on it I designed elastomeric convex side grips that were an evolution on Oxo’s GoodGrips…to help a user keep the tool from torquing in their hand as they used it. It looked better in all white!!

Was at an art gallery opening last night and this was supplying the music.