OW was founded to offer a better way to get consumer and medtch products through detailed design and into the market
Unlike most consultancies, OW does not claim to offer a full end-to-end product development service.
The products we develop require input from a broad range of subject matter experts, typically scientists, analysts, commercial teams, researchers, designers and other third parties. We put an emphasis on working alongside these teams, so the products we develop bring the best of all the accumulated knowledge available.
Our focus is on the ‘sticky middle’ of product development, where mistakes start to get expensive and harder to correct, where the consequences of engineering decisions have a significant bearing on the eventual cost, reliability, performance and ultimately success of the product.
Our systems, procedures, team, and company culture are all geared around this phase of the process. Getting this right can save our clients months or even years in development time.
Since 2022 we’ve worked with multiple consumer and med tech startups, helping them to launch novel products into the market.
These startups have approached us once they have started prototyping their initial designs, and need to go from this early model into tooled, cost optimised, and high quality industrialised products with all the necessary approvals.
Work packages have ranged from engineering specific modules or subsystems that require expertise beyond that which exists within their in-house teams, through to fully managed development of entire devices.
Some of our clients already have vast engineering expertise and resources at their disposal.
These clients tend to come to use for an alternative perspective on the challenges they are facing.
High end consumer product development is an intense combination of moving at a high speed through the project, delivering a truly great consumer proposition and experience, and achieving this at a cost that is viable for the manufacturer.
We are often asked to provide due diligence, conduct a deep dive on a specific mechanism or subsystem or find ways of resolving a design and getting to a tooled device faster than the in-house teams are able to.
Teams within these organisations might only go through detailed design activities (beyond incremental updates or sustaining engineering) once every few years.
We have ongoing partnerships with companies like this where we provide program and technical guidance on how to drive a new device project through these stages.
At times along that journey additional engineering capacity and expertise is often required, and our team can help even this out and keep complex development programs on track.