Senior Industrial Designer, Connected Curb
Erika Avery is an Industrial Designer formerly on the GE Appliances Industrial Design Operations team. She adds value to the cooking team through the design and development of Global Specialty Products for all GEA brands. She brings a diverse and multi-faceted perspective to the business. A native of Auckland, New Zealand, her studies brought her to the United States, where she graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a Bachelor of Industrial Design and a minor in Business Administration.
Before joining the cooking team, she led the end-to-end design function for all Commercial and Retail Air Conditioning products as well as support the Air and Water Business. Her passions are focused upon the intersection of user-centric design and business. This focus influences her approach to designing products that fulfill the needs of expansive and evolving markets. An avid international traveler, Erika has leveraged those travel opportunities to gain critical insights and add significant value to her understanding of design challenges on a global scale. Her insights and observations have proved invaluable in working with global teams and designing products that have a broad appeal across a variety of user groups.
A native of Auckland, New Zealand, Erika studied design in the United States and worked as an industrial designer on the GE Appliances Industrial Design Operations team in Louisville, Kentucky for over four years after graduation. Always on the pursuit of adventure, she’s recently moved to the UK to pursue new design opportunities focused on the intersection of user-centric design and business.
It is Erika’s service as an IDEA Jury member in 2022 that we recognize this year. When our original Jury Chair was unable to participate, Erika stepped up to lead the group through the last stages of the judging cycle at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI and she booked a last-minute flight from Europe to take the stage at the IDEA ceremony in Seattle, WA to help announce our winners.
