Brooks Stevens has seen its fair share of changes in recent years.
Four years ago, Michael Hopkins and his business partner acquired the product development business. Two years ago, the company moved from Allenton to Menomonee Falls, and this summer, the company is beginning work on a new space that will see it move into the city of Milwaukee.
Beyond physical location, Hopkins and his team have also worked to reset the company’s business. The idea is to move away from a “rent-an-engineer” model in which clients are simply outsourcing work they don’t have capacity for toward an outcome-focused approach that provides value for customers.
“We found it to be, one, it’s personally rewarding, the work we do is a lot more engaging, but also the impact we’re having for our clients is much more significant,” said Hopkins, now president and chief executive officer of the company started in 1934 by Clifford Brooks Stevens.
That 90-year history includes design work that shaped many parts of modern life, from cars to boats, outboard motors to lawnmowers, and consumer packaging to home appliances. Stevens died in 1995. His son Kipp continued to run the business until it was acquired in 2007 by Ingenium Product Development.
Hopkins joined the company in 2018 as director of product development. His background includes 16 years at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, launching his own product development firm and working for a number of startups.
Today, the company has 16 employees. Adding in contractors, the team can flex up to 20 or 25 people depending on the workload and specific expertise needed.
While Brooks Stevens’ former location offered a nice middle point between clients in the Milwaukee area and those in the Fond du Lac area, it came with a challenge.
“Really hard to get people to,” Hopkins said. “Once they were there, they’re like, ‘Wow, this place is awesome,’ but it’s 40 minutes from anywhere close.”
So, two years ago, the company made the decision to be more public facing and more inviting, moving to an existing space in Menomonee Falls that could serve not just as a design studio but also as a galley for its work and event space to bring the design community together.
The move to Menomonee Falls helped Hopkins and his team test and validate their ideas for the business. Now, they plan to move to an 11,000-square-foot building on the far northwest side of Milwaukee at 5400 N. 118th Court, formerly occupied by Milwaukee Pain Treatment Center. The move will return Brooks Stevens to the city it was founded in 90 years ago.
“It’s really exciting to be back in Milwaukee and we’re executing on the things we’ve learned the last couple years so that we can restore where Brooks was decades ago,” Hopkins said.
Offering innovation as a service
In the relatively recent history, the model for companies like Brook Stevens had shifted toward the firms offering an outsourcing service for companies looking
to innovate.
The model Hopkins and his team have been working toward is one that is more focused on innovation as a service.
A client may know their market and may know they need a new offering, but they may be having trouble nailing down the details.
The opportunity for Brooks Stevens is to offer a broader focus than just coming up with new ideas, but instead designing with the whole business model in mind.
“There’s a lot of information about design on the internet and there’s prescribed steps, but what those really don’t tell you is the experience of making the right decisions at the right time,” said Ryan Hahn, industrial designer at Brooks Stevens. “I think that’s where a lot of people get into iteration loops where they don’t have a hierarchy of understanding what is needed for the product to be successful.”
“It’s not paint-by-numbers where you just do something really, really well following that process,” Hopkins added. “Did you design this to be the right business model from the beginning, even before you’ve designed it? Was success ever possible in this?”
Hopkins said not accounting for the business model can be a big tripping point in product development.
“Sometimes people are just innovating for creativity’s sake, but they haven’t made that full connection that it still has to be a profitable business. It still has to align with what your business objectives are, and is it going to meet your criteria of success?” he said.
“Sometimes just doing the project well doesn’t get you to that business success,” Hopkins added. “You can have a really, really well designed and engineered product that just never sells.”
Taking that holistic approach to new product development is the goal at Brooks Stevens. Then as products mature or have demonstrated traction in the marketplace, the company is able to hand work back and allow clients to take over.
Hopkins said the company has benefited by not trying to be a one-stop shop for clients and instead recognizing it is part of something bigger the client is trying to achieve.
“You might have the skills internally in the client or maybe neither of us can do it and we have to go find this expert to help us out,” Hopkins said. “We found that was a huge advantage once we got over the idea of, we don’t necessarily always have to be the one that does it all. It was like all of a sudden, the value we’re able to add to clients was a lot higher value.”
New ideas from AI and user feedback
Every project is unique, but Hopkins said one of the areas clients frequently come to the firm with is “the fuzzy front end of ideation.”
“They have some idea of what the future product might be and so they’re usually coming to us to help find the limits of that and explore it a bit deeper,” he said.
Early in the process is also where the Brooks Stevens team has found a use for artificial intelligence tools, Hahn said, noting AI isn’t replacing brainstorming work, but it does help creatively come up with new ideas.
“Creativity is just the connection of ideas and the more connections you have, the more creative you can be and the more breadth of ideas you can have,” Hahn added.
Hopkins pointed out that new technologies are always emerging. For example, when 3D printing emerged, many said companies like Brooks Stevens would no longer need to make models.
“Although we do a lot of 3D printing, we also do a lot of model-making still. They each have their value as unique tools and we see AI as falling into that in some component,” Hopkins said.
A key part of new product development is feedback from users, customers, experts and those in the industry. Hahn said getting quality feedback and insight requires a mixture of a good process and intuition. On a current project, he said the team is conducting interviews with people across the customer’s industry. That generates data points, but the key is going beyond the words the interview subjects use.
“We’re also very hyper-focused on the hidden meaning behind what they’re saying and using that intuition to understand the real problems they’re having,” he said.
Mathias Gran, executive director of Brooks Stevens, said part of the early research on the project involved watching users of the product on YouTube.
“None of the interviews have talked about a key factor that shows up in every single video and so we’re watching videos, and we’re seeing a pain point that no one is naming,” he said.
Hopkins said it’s also important to follow a good process, noting when the company first began work on this project, it seemed there was an obvious solution and the team could jump ahead to its design work.
“We’re like, ‘Whoa, we’ve got to slow down,’” Hopkins said. “We’ve got to validate this because you can get too far too fast.”
