Services
For twenty years the trigger has always been the same: designing a product worth making — the one that ends up standing on a fair. That is the deepest engagement I offer, and the slowest to pay. Around it sit the services that let the practice stay viable: advisory, direction, licensing, and teaching that can run alongside a product in development, or stand entirely on their own.
The core engagement
The full engagement: from the first brief through manufacturing files to the product on the stand. Twenty years of manufacturing fluency — bentwood, rotomoulding, extruded aluminium, EPS, plywood, CNC — applied to a single question asked before anything is drawn: can this be something genuinely original, and can it be made well at the scale it needs?
This is the longest and most involved way to work together — measured in development cycles, not weeks — and it is the one the whole practice is built around. It is also the one that benefits most from running alongside the services below: a collection audit to frame it, a brief to anchor it, fractional direction to steer the wider portfolio while the product matures.
Seen in practice across the work — TON, Bene R-Platform, Tulip, Lite, Arteston.
Ways to engage
Six services that solve the cash-rhythm problem product design creates. Some are finite and fast; some are ongoing; some can run quietly alongside a product in development.
A structured, independent review of an existing product portfolio — what is working, what is redundant, what is missing, what is incoherent. Delivered as a written report with annotated visuals and one debrief call. The diagnosis is shared in conversation; the prescription is the engagement.
A vague product idea turned into a structured, manufacturable brief a factory or designer can actually work from — covering constraints, material logic, manufacturing considerations, and success criteria. The manufacturing-literate front end that saves a development cycle from starting in the wrong place.
Part-time, ongoing senior design direction for a manufacturer that needs creative leadership without a full-time hire — collection strategy, brief development, supplier and designer coordination, trade fair direction. The role held at TON for six years, offered as a fractional engagement.
A short workshop series for design and product teams on integrating AI tools into the furniture and spatial-product workflow — from brief to production file. Calibrated to real manufacturing, not generic AI literacy: a combination of craft and digital fluency a general AI trainer cannot replicate.
Finished design concepts available for manufacturer development — a licence to develop the concept for production, plus royalty on units sold, with IP ownership retained. The fastest path from a finished idea to a product on the market when the right manufacturer is identified.
A newsletter for brand managers, product managers, and founders — how design decisions connect to manufacturing reality and market positioning, written from inside the factory floor. Not for designers; for the people who need to understand design decisions without being designers themselves.
The right engagement depends on where you are — a portfolio that has lost coherence, a product idea that needs a manufacturable brief, a development that needs senior direction, or a finished concept ready to license. A short conversation is the way to find out which.
info@michalriabic.com