Product Designer, Kiwico
Gavin Rea is a product designer at Kiwico in Mountain View, CA, where he designs educational toys and kits for the online store. He also designs subscription crate lines and currently works on the oldest, Eureka Crate. He graduated from College for Creative Studies, has worked as prototyper and modelmaker at Gemmiti Model Art, and has done freelance design work for multiple companies in the SF Bay. Working at Kiwico has allowed Gavin to work in laser cutting, 3D printing, kid-testing, product testing and manufacturing. In his free time Gavin enjoys sketching, mountain biking, architecture and doing anything to stay active during COVID.
Zero to Woah, Awesome
A walk-through of the rapid toy product development process at Kiwico
The gap between the idea for a product and its arrival on a customer’s doorstep is huge and full of unknowns. As part of an in-house team at Kiwico, Gavin has had the opportunity to take every step to bridge this gap with multiple products. He’ll go through the process step by step, showing problems he’s encountered and offering tips and tricks along the way.
Working in-house on a small team means being in charge of all stages of the process and making design decisions (and revisions!) to improve cost, manufacturability, assembly and a million other small factors. Steps include: Concept, Prototyping, CAD, Kid Testing, Sourcing, Purchase Order, Vendor Sampling, Editorial and collateral content, QA, shipping and customer feedback.
