PRODUCT DESIGN

Soft goods, Industrial/Technical design, Illustration, Packaging

At a tradeshow in Las Vegas, holding the new exclusively designed Baby line, my first ever product line.

Fiesta Toy and Squishmallows are the two companies I've worked with on product designs for the past 5+ years. Working back and forth with factories in Asia, I provided overlays, comments, color choices, and more to create the best overall product. Some clients I was excited to work with were Sanrio, Peanuts, Warner Brothers, Universal, Spam, and much more.

Aside from working with licenses, I developed new original characters for each company that proved to be bestsellers, some even generating millions in sales a year. Some of these characters at Fiesta Toy include Ramen-san and Dani the avocado. At Squishmallow, people rave over Lijjian the capybara, Benny the snowman bigfoot, and Bimbi the halloween clown! At Fiesta Toy, one of my greatest accomplishments was launching my own exclusively designed Baby line, which features long, squishy characters that babies love to cuddle!

Three of my most recent original designs from Squishmallows. For Squishmallows, I learned the brand guidelines that make a Squishmallow a Squishmallow. This included certain eye sizes, trends to follow, and understanding our demographics. One particular thing we pay attention to closely is how squishy each product is, sometimes we even open them up and examine the stuffing. We design new products every season that follow colors and items that are popular and do extensive research to make a successful line that hopefully resonates with our fans.

Below you can see some of the fan favorites I've designed on Squishmallow's instagram.

Working hand in hand with characters like Hello Kitty and Friends, Bob Ross, Snoopy, etc. I took comments from each licensed properties contact to align on final products. These products can be found anywhere and everywhere.

To start each product design, we first think about what the client is seeking and pitch concepts. Sometimes, we are provided with moodboards and brand guides that help us kickstart our product research.

Then, I provide sketches and vector designs made on Adobe Illustrator. I always create a wide array of body shapes, color choices, face expressions, etcetera...

After we recieve prototypes for each design, we review products and examine the sculpt and color, then provide overlays to factories in Asia to improve the product for final production. See photo below for an example of that process, which includes an overlay and a Adobe Photoshop image edit of the product!

In addition to product design, I've also worked on many packaging designs and product designs other than plush, pictured below. I illustrated many of the designs, except for licensed items which sometimes have style guides to adhere to. Pictured below are various goods, like reusable straws, Gudetama cutie beans, recycled tote bags with illustrations on them, animal pun t-shirts, etc.