If you’re developing your first product, the cost of industrial design can come as a bit of a shock. You approach a studio about getting a prototype, and are handed a multi-step proposal with a price tag equal to a medium sized boat. On the other hand, someone is offering design services on Upwork for $20 an hour.
The following lays out just what goes into a well-designed product: the hours, experience, training, and equipment, the research and iteration that is necessary to create something genuinely competitive.
Design is the core of our job, but that’s not the first step. Before we start sorting out how something will look and how it will be made, we need to build an understanding of the target audience, market competitors, cost constraints, manufacturing infrastructure, and any other areas of research necessary to support a robust design. This is quite time consuming up front, but it’s a lot cheaper than bringing something to market and discovering that it cannot sell.
There’s a common misunderstanding that designers put pen to paper and something brilliant springs out, fully formed. While this may happen for some people, I’ve never experienced it. What ideation usually looks like is hours of sketching, in both 2D and 3D, discarding bad ideas and keeping good ones until it starts to hit the goals that have already been established. Knowing the good from the bad, and the ability to push an idea from a rough sketch to something that can actually be built takes years of experience and practice.
I should add that while we occasionally make use of AI for renderings and presentation images, we have found it quite useless for actual design work. It can make pretty pictures all day long, but they are just amalgamations of other peoples’ designs and lack originality. As of late 2025, anyway.
Physical products need physical testing. We nearly always go through multiple rounds of prototyping, from rough cardboard mockups to high fidelity 3D prints (or whatever other material method is needed). All of these take time and money, especially the 1:1 ones that work.
It’s important to remember that while a 3D print alone may be quite inexpensive, what you’re really paying for is the research, design, CAD hours, and preliminary prototyping that happens first.
We rely on advanced CAD and rendering software, good quality prototyping tools, a nice space to work and, most importantly, an amazing team. It’s not cheap to keep everyone and everything maintained, updated, oiled and paid, but it’s worth every penny.
A prototype is nice, but the real goal is mass production. We’ve spent nearly a decade building relationships with vendors around the world, and have a deep base of manufacturing experience to ensure that the things we design can actually be made. The manufacturing phase is where mistakes start getting really expensive, and we’ve been doing this long enough to spot and deal with potential problems before they have financial implications.
Once in a while someone comes along who has an expensive idea and is prepared to sink a significant part of their personal assets to make it happen. This is fine, but everyone should be aware that every venture, no matter how well planned, designed and executed, has a chance of failure. If you need to mortgage your house to get your product off the ground we’ll ask you to find a less risky source of funds before we can work with you.
Most designers have had extensive education, either at school or by experience, and put countless hours into getting good at what they do. Design exists where engineering, art, and psychology overlap, and it’s one of those trades that you can study for a lifetime and never stop learning and improving*. A good designer will understand your market and user, design for production, consider ancillary costs, solve manufacturing concerns, and be with you from ideation to launch. And no, this won’t be cheap. But your product will look great, work, and with any luck, make back everything you invested and more.
If you still want to argue about costing (or get a quote), let's talk about it!