Exhibitor interview with product designer: Patrick Kealy, new product director for Merlyn
The customer is at the heart of everything we do, so before we get into designing the physical product we want to understand the prob-lems people face.
The best way to do this is to engage with our customers and create a wide range of solutions to these problems.
Understanding their daily routines, pains and desires allows us to create meaningful user-centred solutions that they can connect with.
Our ideas are then honed and the best are selected to test with consumers. Using this process, we can refine and validate the product to create new designs that the market demands.
We are constantly trying to push the boundaries of design for our consumers, while understanding costs versus commercial reality.
This makes us seek innovative solutions to doing things with the materials we use and we are constantly looking for engineering advancements that can decrease costs, while keeping our high standards of quality.
One of our core beliefs is that you should be able to get ‘good design’ on any budget, so we put the same care and attention to detail into all of our products. We strongly believe quality design transcends all budgets.
With the growth of interest in environmental concerns, the next challenge is how we – as an industry – deliver our designs in a more environmentally efficient way.
We are actively working internally, and with our supply chain partners, to reduce our environmental impact and have been awarded the ISO 14001 for Environmental Management.