Frequently Asked Questions
Wherever you are in the process, we have the capabilities and resources to help you reach the finish line.
Building a product is complicated enough as it is.
Getting answers about building a product shouldn’t be
We want product development to be as straightforward and clear as it can be, and that starts with answering questions before you have to ask them. Below you’ll find what founders and brand teams ask us most: how our design process works, what product development costs, how long it takes, how we handle intellectual property and manufacturing, and what it’s actually like to work with an industrial design partner.
We’ve answered these as directly as we know how, including the parts that are harder to hear.
Section 1 — Getting Started & Project Fit
Yes. We work with first-time founders and early-stage entrepreneurs all the time, and a meaningful portion of our work is helping first-time founders build products from the ground up.
To make sure we’re building the right thing, we typically have early-stage clients fill out a Product Requirements Document (PRD) before any design work begins. Our PRD is a document similar to a design brief that captures what the product needs to do, who it’s for, the constraints it has to live within, and the success criteria. It’s a short exercise that pays off across every phase that follows — and for many first-time founders, working through the PRD with us is the first time the product has been fully thought through on paper.
We work with founders and entrepreneurs at every stage of the product development process. Some clients come to us with manufacturing, distribution, and marketing plans already in place, while others are still working through those considerations. Whether you’re at the very beginning, or have a few seasons of sales under your belt, we often start with an Innovation Accelerator Workshop to align priorities, pressure-test assumptions, and create a clear path forward.
Yes, within reason. We can take on small, focused exercises — a quick design audit, a sketch sprint, a manufacturing assessment, building a fast prototype, etc. — for clients with limited budgets who need a starting point.
Every project is different, so there isn’t a universal minimum budget. Some clients engage us for a focused exercise, while others move directly into a multi-phase development program. The best way to determine fit is a quick conversation about your product, goals, and budget, and we’ll recommend the most effective path forward.
Project cost depends on category, complexity, and how much of the development process you need help with. Every engagement is custom-scoped to the specific product, the stage you’re at, and the deliverables you need.
The best way to get a real number is a short discovery call. We’ll ask the right questions, give you an honest range for what your specific project will take, and walk you through how we’d structure the work.
We work in phases — Groundwork and Discovery, Design Exploration, Design Refinement, Design for Manufacture, and Commercialization — and price each phase against the actual scope. That means you make informed decisions at each step rather than committing to the entire program upfront.
To set rough expectations: design and development costs typically run somewhere between $15,000 and $150,000, depending on project complexity and the stage you’re entering the process at. A focused exercise on an existing product sits at the lower end. A full multi-phase development program for a complex new product sits at the higher end. Three variables move that number more than anything else — the stage you’re entering at, the manufacturing process the product calls for, and the location of the vendors you’ll ultimately build with. A simpler soft good produced regionally and a complex hard good tooled overseas live on opposite ends of the range.
We’ll be able to give you an accurate idea of what the costs might look like, so you’re armed with the knowledge you need to make the right next steps.
Because every project is different, and a single number on a webpage will almost always be wrong for your specific situation.
You’ll find some approximate ranges noted above, in the section on “How much does it cost to develop a product with Trailside Creative?” — for design and development, prototyping, and tooling — because we think those ballparks are useful when you’re trying to figure out whether the conversation is even worth having. We don’t publish any specific pricing because the variables that move a project’s real cost are too big to ignore, and a budget that fits comfortably for one project would be wildly off for another that may look superficially similar.
What we’d rather do is have a short conversation. We’ll ask about your product, your stage, your timeline, and your commercialization plan, and give you an honest, specific number for what your project would take. No commitment, no pressure — just a real answer to a real question.
The exception is our Innovation Accelerator Workshops, which are productized at fixed prices. We share workshop pricing on intro calls.
It depends entirely on product complexity, and most founders underestimate by a wide margin. Many founders new to the product development process come to us expecting a finished product in under six months. Unfortunately, the reality across most outdoor, hunting, fishing, and action sports categories is twelve to eighteen months from a blank sheet to production-ready — and for more complex products with regulatory testing, custom tooling, or technical materials, the process can stretch to thirty-six months or more.
A lot of that time isn’t design — it’s the supply chain. Textiles alone can take up to 120 days just to get into our hands before we can build a prototype. Custom tooling, factory queues, sampling rounds, color and material development, and certification testing all take weeks or months that don’t show up in optimistic plans.
The factories building today’s products were scoped, sampled, and tooled twelve to eighteen months ago. If you’re starting now and you want a product on retail shelves a year from now, the honest answer is usually “not this one — let’s plan the right one.” We’d rather set a realistic timeline upfront than a comfortable one we’d have to walk back later.
Honestly? More than you’d think. The biggest accelerators on the founder side aren’t technical — they’re behavioral.
1. The single biggest one: decide fast, and decide with one voice. The most common drag on a project isn’t the work itself, it’s waiting for the client to make a call, or second guessing a decision and changing their mind. A two-week delay on a decision becomes2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. a two-week slip everywhere downstream. If your team has multiple stakeholders weighing in (co-founders, investors, advisors), name one person who has authority to say yes or no at every gate. Design-by-committee is slower than design-by-trust.
2. Take the PRD seriously. Founders who treat it as a checkbox cost themselves weeks because we end up going back to clarify assumptions mid-project. Founders who treat it as strategy work get a tighter scope, a more accurate proposal, and a faster arc through every phase that follows. It’s the document where you front-load the thinking, and the time you spend on it gets paid back several times over.
3. Don’t change directions mid-stream. A pivot after CAD has started — or a new feature request after prototyping — doesn’t just cost the work of the change. It costs the work that came before, plus the work that has to be redone after. Hold direction tight inside each phase. Save the bigger pivots for the Phase Gates, where they’re cheap.
4. Run things in parallel, not in series. Supply chain conversations, certification testing, packaging design, marketing strategy, retail relationships — these all have lead times measured in months. Start them while the design work is happening, not after. Founders who hit their launch dates treat product development as one of several parallel workstreams, not the only thing in motion at the company.
5. Keep cash flowing. Cash gaps stall projects more than any technical issue we encounter. When a phase ends and the next phase isn’t funded, the team gets reassigned, momentum dies, and restarting costs weeks of warm-up time. If you can see a funding gap coming, tell us before it happens — we can sometimes restructure to bridge it without losing the thread. Remember that we’re here to be your partner and see you succeed, and we can only help you when you tell us you need assistance.
6. Trust the team you hired. If you brought us in, let us drive the design between the gates. Founders who second-guess every concept, request every revision through a personal opinion, or want to be in the room for every internal working session slow the work to a crawl. We love to collaborate, but can move fastest when you give us clear direction at the gates and let us run between them. And our promise to you is that we’ll keep you in the loop, because no one wants to spend weeks going down the wrong path.
7. And probably one of the most important to remember, the paradoxical one: set a realistic timeline. Founders who plan honestly hit their dates more often than founders who set aggressive targets. Aggressive targets create pressure, pressure creates corner-cutting, corner-cutting creates rework. We’d rather start with twelve months and finish on time than start with six and finish in eighteen.
AI images are a great starting point, but they often prioritize appearance over function.. These images should not be considered a completed design, since they generally have no geometry, material specification, engineering, ergonomic logic, and no understanding of how the parts go together or come out of a mold.
What we can do is use your AI images as a directional reference. They tell us what you’re going for visually. From there, we go through our process to implement the ideas, and uncover new concepts: we start with discovery, explorative sketching, 3D CAD models, prototyping, and eventually DFM. That’s the work that turns a picture into a product that exists, performs, and can be manufactured.
The first call is a casual 30-minute discovery conversation about your product, your goals, and where you are in the development process. You don’t need a polished pitch deck. Rough sketches, photos, notes, mood boards, AI concepts, or a plain-language explanation are plenty to start.
We’ll talk through your product category, the problem you’re solving, your stage of development, budget and timeline expectations, manufacturing considerations, any IP (intellectual property) concerns, and whether the project is a strong fit for our team.
One of the most valuable things we do on a first call is help you figure out what stage you’re actually in. The most common mistake we see is founders spending money solving the wrong problem first — coming in ready to prototype when they still need research and concept work, or talking to factories before the design direction is even defined. Part of our job is steering you toward the right phase before time and money get wasted.
If a project falls outside our wheelhouse — especially software-first or digital products — we’ll tell you, and point you toward firms that fit better. And if you need to share confidential information early, we’re happy to sign an NDA before the conversation.
No. Our design-gineering approach means we handle the structural logic, part breakdowns, assembly strategies, material selection, and tool-safe geometry internally — without you needing a mechanical engineer on staff. For most outdoor, action sports, hunting, and fishing products, that’s enough.
When a project genuinely requires deeper specialization — FEA simulation, certified stress analysis, complex electromechanical systems, custom PCB or firmware work — we bring in our trusted engineering partners and manage the handoff. You stay with one point of contact at Trailside, and we coordinate the technical team behind the scenes. You don’t have to assemble a fragmented group of agencies and freelancers yourself.For more detail on what we handle internally versus when we bring in specialists, see the “What is design-gineering?” question in Section 4.
We work across the full spectrum — funded early-stage startups, established outdoor brands, and global heritage brands with internal teams at capacity. Company size isn’t the deciding factor.
What matters is whether you have a real plan to commercialize the product. A solo founder with a credible go-to-market plan and the funding to execute is a strong fit. A 200-person brand expanding into a new category is a strong fit. A large brand needing senior design capacity for a major program is a strong fit. What doesn’t fit is a great idea with no plan beyond designing it — that’s a workshop conversation, not a full development program.
Our agency footprint stays intentionally small. That’s how we keep senior team members on every project, keep communication direct, and stay accessible for fast-moving founders without the friction of an agency org chart in between.
Section 2 — Workshops & Ways to Engage
An Innovation Accelerator Workshop is a focused, in-studio session that brings the Trailside team together with you and your team to accelerate your project on day one. It’s our preferred way to start an engagement — and frankly, we’d recommend it for almost every client.
In a single day, we can sketch concepts, pressure-test assumptions, identify the real engineering and manufacturing constraints, align on priorities, and leave with a clear path forward. For early-stage founders, it replaces months of back-and-forth and helps the rest of the program move faster and more efficiently. For established brands, it’s an efficient way to align internal stakeholders and our team around a new project before scoping a full development program.
Workshops come in one-day and two-day formats. Both include Kyle as Principal plus two Trailside designers in the room — a three-person Trailside team supporting your group, regardless of format. The one-day session covers concept sketching, alignment, constraint-mapping, and a clear path forward. The two-day session adds time for deeper exploration, more concept directions, and more detailed prototyping where the project allows.
The second day is priced at a discount, so a two-day workshop is meaningfully less than twice the cost of a one-day.
Workshops are fixed-price. Contact us for current pricing.
No, you don’t have to come to Texas — but the best workshops happen in person, and there are real reasons to consider it.
Our Innovation Accelerator Workshops come in two formats:
On-site: We come to your studio, or you come to ours. In-person workshops move faster, build stronger team chemistry, and let us sketch, prototype, and pressure-test ideas together in real time. When clients come to our Hill Country studio, they also get hands-on access to the Trailside Materials Library and our in-house prototyping resources — both of which are hard to replicate over video. And there’s no better place than Texas for Texas barbecue.
Remote: When in-person isn’t feasible, our virtual workshop format runs the same agenda from anywhere in the world. We’ve run remote workshops with clients on three continents. The output is strong; the format is just different.
Most full design programs after the workshop run as a mix of remote work and periodic in-person sessions for key milestones — concept reviews, prototype reviews, factory visits. We’ll scope the right rhythm during onboarding.
We can, but we don’t recommend it for most projects. Hourly engagements look cheap on the front end and almost always end up costing clients more — because every revision, conversation, and back-and-forth runs the meter, and the scope keeps shifting under their feet.
Our standard engagements are scoped in phases with defined deliverables and fixed fees. You know what you’re paying for, we know what we’re building, and the conversation stays focused on the product instead of the clock. The exception is later-stage production support (Phase 5 and beyond), which is inherently unpredictable and is billed hourly.
Every engagement is custom-built around the specific client and project, and we’ll recommend the structure that fits best.
In most cases, projects start as fixed-fee work scoped against specific deliverables — typically through Phases 1 to 4. Fixed fees keep the conversation focused on the product instead of the clock, because you know exactly what you’re paying for and we know exactly what we’re building.
Once a project moves into Phase 5 (Commercialization and Manufacturing), we shift to an hourly retainer with a defined scope and specific deliverables agreed at the start of the phase.Production support is inherently unpredictable — it depends on the factory, the timeline, and how many issues need resolving as production ramps — so hourly is the only honest way to scope it.
For some clients, the work makes more sense as an ongoing hourly or retainer engagement from the start, particularly for brands with continuous product development needs or established design-partner relationships. We’ll talk it through during scoping and recommend the model that gets the best outcome for your specific situation.
Section 3 — Our Process & What to Expect
A PRD — sometimes called a design brief — is one of the foundational tools we use during Groundwork and Discovery. It aligns everyone around a shared understanding of what the product needs to do, who it’s for, and what constraints and goals shape the work.
Depending on the project, a PRD might cover product goals, target customer profiles, competitive analysis, functional requirements, materials and construction preferences, manufacturing assumptions, target retail price and landed cost, performance expectations, regulatory considerations, timelines, and brand and aesthetic direction. The more accurate the PRD, the tighter the alignment between our team and yours.
Here’s why it matters: late-stage design changes are expensive. Once you’re into CAD, prototyping, tooling, or factory discussions, every change costs real money and time. An hour spent defining goals clearly upfront saves days of rework later. The PRD also lets us build a far more accurate proposal and development roadmap, and it often becomes the starting point for the larger product strategy that guides a project through all six phases of our process.
The goal isn’t paperwork. It’s making sure everyone is solving the right problem before the big investments start.
It’s customized per project and spelled out in your Statement of Work, because every product and timeline is different. We approach development as a collaborative process, not a transactional handoff — we work as an extension of your team, not an outside consultant lobbing deliverables over a wall.
Early in Design Exploration, we typically present multiple directions to drive discussion and surface the strongest opportunities. As the project moves forward, the direction narrows and sharpens based on your feedback, technical requirements, and manufacturing constraints.
Revisions get documented collaboratively inside the project’s password-protected Miro board, which you have full access to throughout — you can leave comments, upload references and inspiration images, review sketches and concepts, track progress, and revisit past discussions and meeting notes anytime.
Our review cadence is both milestone-based and phase-based. We hold formal Design Reviews whenever there’s meaningful work to look at, plus a review at the end of each major phase as part of our Phase Gate Process. Those phase gates exist to reduce downstream risk: confirming the design is ready to advance, stakeholders are aligned, and we’re solving the right problems before more money goes in. Phase Gate sign-off itself is straightforward — the client simply confirms we’re approved to move forward to the next phase. No complex paperwork, just an explicit alignment check before more time and budget are committed.
We welcome iteration — product development is inherently iterative. What structured reviews prevent is the endless subjective revision loop that kills momentum and runs up costs. If you need more exploration or refinement beyond the original scope, we can expand the project easily.
Regularly, and directly with the designers doing the work — not through layers of account managers. Day-to-day communication runs through your project’s dedicated Design Lead, with Kyle staying involved as Design Principal throughout.
Frequency scales with the phase. Early Design Exploration tends to involve rapid back-and-forth on concepts. DFM phases lean toward engineering and factory coordination. Commercialization brings sourcing, manufacturing reviews, and production support. Some phases are simply more communication-heavy than others.
For daily collaboration, we rely primarily on Miro, Google Meet, and email, plus messaging tools for quick coordination with clients and overseas factory partners. But we’re also big believers in the quick phone or video call. A two-minute conversation almost always beats a chain of ten emails or texts — most of the miscommunication that creeps into a project comes from trying to resolve nuanced things in writing. When something needs sorting out, we’ll often just call.
The biggest anxiety most clients carry is not knowing where a project stands. Our whole process is built to keep that visible — transparent, collaborative, and easy to check in on whenever you want.
We run projects on two systems, each with a distinct job. Monday.com handles our internal project management — scheduling, task tracking, and keeping the team coordinated behind thescenes. Miro is our client-facing visual project management system, where project data, sketches, concepts, references, and design reviews all live in one place.
As a client, you get full access to the Miro board throughout the project. You can review progress, leave comments, upload inspiration and reference images, track revisions, and revisit past discussions and meeting notes at any time, from anywhere in the world. It’s how we keep development transparent and collaborative no matter where you’re located.
Deliverables are matched to the scope of work. Every project is structured around our phases of product development, and where your project ends determines what you walk away with.
Front-end projects (Phases 1–2: Groundwork and Discovery, Design Exploration). These engagements focus on research and design exploration. Deliverables typically include research findings, sketched and rendered concept exploration, and where useful, early mockups or hand prototypes that bring the concepts into the physical world.
Mid-length projects (Phases 1–3: through Design Refinement). You receive everything from the front-end work, plus the deliverables that come out of Phase 3: detailed 3D renderings and initial CAD models. By the end, you have a defined direction with the geometry to back it up.
Full-length projects (Phases 1–4, sometimes into Phase 5). For projects that go all the way through Design for Manufacture and into production, the deliverable package expands significantly. You receive factory-ready CAD models, tooling drawings, technical packages (tech packs), bills of materials (BOMs), and all the collateral required to bring the product to market for your specific category and scope. The exact contents vary by product type — a hard goods project’s package looks different from a soft goods or apparel project’s package — but the principle is the same: everything the factory needs to make your product correctly.
Section 4 — What We Design (Capabilities & Categories)
Trailside Creative is an industrial design agency specializing in the Outdoor and Action Sports Industries — broadly defined. That includes:
Cycling, mountain biking, gravel and road, off-road, overland, camping, action sports, motorcycle and dirt bike, backpacking, fishing, hunting, hiking, snow sports, swimming, surfing, and most other pursuits that happen outside.
If it’s a physical product built for people who’d rather be outside than in, we’re likely the right fit. The best way to find out is a quick first call.
Based on our experience making wearables and safety gear, another industry we do a lot of work in is the Industrial Safety industry. Think hard hats, fall harnesses and fall protection, gloves, knee pads, etc. With over 25 years and counting of experience protecting people, our roots go deep here.
Yes. Soft goods are a core part of Trailside Creative’s capabilities across the outdoor, cycling, fishing, and action sports industries. That includes backpacks, bags, sewn accessories, protective gear, and technical textile products of all kinds.
Our team has deep experience in cut-and-sew development — pattern development, materials selection, construction methods, and prototype fabrication. We design soft goods the same way we design everything else: with manufacturing constraints informing decisions from day one, so the product that comes out of a factory actually matches what was designed.
We also understand that great soft goods design requires balancing aesthetics, durability, comfort, and cost. A pack that looks great on a render but falls apart on a trail is just a failed product. We design for the user and the environment they’re actually in.
A real differentiator on the soft goods side: our Hill Country studio is set up for in-house fabrication. We have multiple industrial sewing machines and can pattern, cut, and sew nearly anything from backpacks to technical apparel to tents. That lets us iterate physical samples in-house — sometimes within hours — before any factory sampling round begins. For early-stage soft goods development, it shaves real weeks and dollars out of the timeline.
Yes, and it’s a core part of what we do. The Trailside team has designed consumer products, outdoor equipment, sporting goods, tools, accessories, and technical hardware across a wide range of manufacturing processes — injection molded plastics, metals, composites, foams, and hybrid hard/soft assemblies.
A core part of our value on hard goods projects is what we sometimes call “design-gineering.” Not everyone on the team is a credentialed mechanical engineer, but everyone here is a designer who thinks like an engineer — and that means we make products that actually work. We handle a significant portion of the engineering thinking internally without sending you out to hire additional support. When a project demands deep mechanical engineering, we bring in our trusted ME partners. Most of the time, you don’t have to.
Our work covers the full arc: early concept development and industrial design, through CAD, prototyping, testing, DFM, and production support. We don’t hand off a sketch and walk away — we stay involved through the phases where most of the expensive problems show up.Founder Kyle Ellison designed award-winning hard goods at Bell Helmets, Giro Sport Design, and YETI Coolers before founding Trailside Creative. That experience is part of what the practice is built on.
Yes. Trailside Creative supports technical apparel and performance sewn product development for outdoor and active lifestyle brands, with our contracted Apparel Lead, Michelle French, bringing specialist-level expertise to every apparel program.
Our approach to apparel comes from an industrial design background — which means we think about it from a systems perspective. How does the garment interact with a pack, a helmet, protective equipment, or the user’s movement patterns in the field? Mobility, layering, durability, weather resistance, ventilation, and ergonomics all get factored in alongside aesthetics and construction.
We can assist with concept development, material selection, prototype development, fit evaluations, construction detailing, and manufacturing coordination — from the first sketch through to the first production sample.
Yes, and it’s one of the areas where Trailside brings the deepest experience in the business. Founder Kyle Ellison started his career designing helmets in Santa Cruz, California and spent years at Giro Sport Design and Bell Helmets developing fit systems, ventilation strategies, impact protection, and CMF (Color, Material, and Finish) Design for some of the most recognized helmets in cycling and action sports.
Named projects from Kyle’s career include the Bell Super 2R (IDEA Silver Award, 2015), the Bell Sequence (Editors Choice, 2010), the Giro Feature (Editors Choice, 2011), the Bell Sidetrack, the Bell Vortex, and the Giro Montane. More recently, Trailside designed the woom kids’ helmet, which won a 2025 iF Design Award.
In 2018 and 2019, Trailside designed an indoor skydiving helmet for a client program that included extensive wind tunnel testing, new mechanism engineering, and a complete helmet design. The product is still in development and not yet public, but the work expanded the team’s experience into aerodynamic performance, mechanism design, and air-sports-specific ergonomics.
Designing for head protection means balancing complex surface geometry, strict ergonomic requirements, ventilation engineering, and impact performance — all while making something a user actually wants to wear. We’ve done it across multiple categories and we know where the problems hide.
Yes. A meaningful portion of Trailside’s portfolio includes products headed for regulatory compliance — CPSC, CE, ASTM, DOT, and others depending on category.
We’re not a certified testing laboratory, and we’ll never pretend to be. What we do is design with certification requirements in mind from the beginning, so you’re not discovering structural problems or material issues at the testing stage.
This is also where one of our core design philosophies shows up most clearly: every product starts with form follows function and proceeds with form follows failure. The form of a design isn’t only defined by what the product needs to do — it’s defined by the failures we see along the way. Each round of prototyping, internal testing, and user feedback surfaces failures, and each failure defines an adjustment that gets baked into the next iteration. By the time a product goes to formal certification testing, it’s already been through the hard problems internally.
Categories we’ve worked in with regulatory requirements include helmets, protective equipment, children’s products, and outdoor gear with load-bearing or impact-related performance standards. When the product needs to pass a test, that test informs the design from day one — not after the CAD is done.
Yes. Trailside Creative has experience developing products for children, families, and youth-focused outdoor activities — including kids’ helmets, recreational products, and active lifestyle accessories.
Designing for children requires a different mindset than adult products. Safety, durability, intuitive use, age-appropriate ergonomics, and sizing all need to work together, and the regulatory environment is more demanding. Many children’s products are subject to additional compliance requirements — ASTM F963 for toys, CPSC guidelines for protective equipment — and we design with those frameworks in mind from the start.
We work alongside engineering and manufacturing partners to help clients navigate testing requirements and production constraints when needed. If the product is for kids, the stakes for getting it right are higher. We treat it that way.
Design-gineering is shorthand we use for how the Trailside team approaches its work. Not everyone on the team is a credentialed mechanical engineer — but everyone is a designer who thinks like one.In practice, this means we make products that function, not just products that look good in a rendering. We can carry a significant portion of the engineering decisions internally — material selection, structural logic, mechanism design, manufacturing process planning, tool-safe geometry — without forcing you to staff up or hire external engineering firms for every step. That keeps projects faster, cheaper, and more cohesive.
When a product requires deep mechanical engineering — FEA simulation, certified stress analysis, complex electromechanical systems, or specialized engineering disciplines — we bring in our trusted mechanical engineering partners. The handoff is clean because we’ve been thinking like engineers from the first sketch.
For most outdoor, action sports, hunting, and fishing products, design-gineering is enough. For the ones that need more, we know exactly when and how to bring in the right specialists.
Yes. We’re a conscientious team, and we understand that decisions made during product development have environmental impacts that extend far beyond the design phase—from material selection and manufacturing processes to product lifespan and end-of-life considerations. When sustainability is a project priority, we help clients evaluate those decisions and make informed tradeoffs based on their goals, supply chain, budget, and performance requirements.
Sustainability is rarely one-size-fits-all. The right solution depends on the product category, manufacturing process, geography, and intended use. Rather than forcing a predetermined approach, we work with clients to identify the most practical and impactful opportunities for their specific product.
One principle we strongly believe in is that durability and repairability are fundamental to sustainability. A product that lasts longer and can be repaired stays in use longer and reduces the need for replacement. Especially in outdoor categories where products are expected to perform in demanding conditions, we design with longevity in mind.
Yes. A meaningful portion of our work involves integrated electronics — most recently the Archer DBR, a product Trailside designed and developed end-to-end with embedded electronics built into the form.
The depth on our team is real. Rob and Myrna together carry more than 25 years of combined consumer electronics and medical device design experience, all of which involved integrating electronics into physical products — circuit board housing, battery integration, charging interfaces, environmental sealing, and the human factors around physical and digital touchpoints. That experience came directly into Trailside.
When a project calls for engineering work outside what we can handle internally — custom PCB design, firmware development, specialized RF or sensor work, certified electrical compliance — we bring in our engineering network. We’ve been working with these partners for years and can assemble the right technical team without you having to find and vet them yourself.
Trailside specializes in physical product development. Generally speaking we keep our focus on designing hard goods, soft goods, gear, and equipment.
The one exception: if a digital interface is part of a physical product we’re designing — a connected device’s companion app, the firmware UI on a piece of hardware, the on-product display on a piece of equipment — we’ll take it on as part of the broader project. We don’t take standalone app, website, or pure-software work.
No. Website design and development isn’t part of our practice. We can recommend partners we trust if you need one, but we’d rather you go to a firm that specializes in marketing sites or e-commerce than have us moonlight outside our expertise.
Section 5 — Working Together & Collaboration
Yes, and it’s one of the most common ways we work with established brands. Most of the teams we partner with have plenty of engineering talent but no internal industrial design resource. In those cases, Trailside brings the aesthetic, economic, and user-centered design perspective that makes a well-engineered product genuinely great to use. We become stewards of the design — making sure the original design intent survives all the way into full production, instead of getting eroded by engineering and manufacturing compromises along the way.
When a brand has a small design team that’s simply at capacity, we work as an internal supercharger. Our external capacity lets in-house teams take on projects they otherwise couldn’tstaff — sharing the workload and adding fresh perspective without the cost and lead time of new hires.
We also frequently partner with established brands that want to move into a new product category outside their core expertise. This is one of the biggest reasons brands come to us: outdoor-industry-specific design experience across both hard and soft goods. We’ve helped hard goods companies move into soft goods, and soft goods companies — say, a bag maker — develop their first hard component. Because we design and develop both, we’re well suited to guide that kind of category expansion in either direction.
Yes. The same way we integrate with internal teams, we collaborate with a brand’s external partners — marketing, branding, engineering, whoever’s already in your corner.
And if you don’t have those partners yet but need them, we can help. Over the years we’ve built our own network of trusted marketing, branding, and engineering specialists, and we’re happy to connect you with the right outside marketing partner when a project calls for capabilities outside our scope.
Both, by design. Kyle stays engaged as Design Principal on every project. His role is to guide the design from the big-picture view — how the final product fits into your brand’s overall lineup and into the larger market. Your dedicated Design Lead works alongside Kyle to execute the concepts and manages the day-to-day work and communication.
You get senior strategic oversight and a hands-on primary contact at the same time, without being passed around or filtered through account managers.
Trailside Creative is based in the Texas Hill Country, outside Austin. Our clients and factory partners are spread around the globe, and we work with brands across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Geography doesn’t change the quality of the work. What it changes is logistics, and we plan for that from day one — meeting times, sample shipping, factory communication, and prototype review all get scoped against your timezone, not ours.
Yes. We have clients in Europe, Asia, and across North America, and we’re comfortable taking late-evening or early-morning meetings when the work calls for it. If your team is on the other side of the world, we’ll meet you where your day is, not force you into ours.
Section 6 — Intellectual Property, NDAs & Legal
You do. The product IP belongs to the client, full stop.
Trailside has no interest in owning, gatekeeping, or sharing rights to the specific designs, products, or commercial IP we develop with you. When the engagement is complete and fees are paid, the design IP is yours to patent, manufacture, license, and commercialize as you see fit.
The one requirement we hold to is on inventorship, not ownership. Patent law requires that anyone who made a meaningful inventive contribution to a patentable invention be named as an inventor on the patent. If our designers contribute meaningfully to patentable IP generated during your project, they need to be named as inventors when the patent is filed. That’s a legal requirement, not a claim on the IP itself — the patent and all commercial rights still belong to you.
You do. At the end of the project, you own all of the collateral that gets delivered to the factory — final CAD models, technical and tooling drawings, and tech packs.
The files are yours to use, modify, transfer, or take to a different factory or design firm later. We don’t gatekeep client IP, and we don’t hold deliverables hostage. Once fees are paid and the project closes, the package is yours.
Yes. Trailside maintains its own intellectual property around our design processes, methods, frameworks, and any new techniques or insights we develop that improve how we work.
This is separate from any client project IP. Anything we learn during a project that refines our process — our approach to manufacturing partner vetting, our prototyping methods, our design exploration frameworks — stays with us. It’s how a design consultancy gets better over time, and it’s what every client benefits from when they hire us.What this does not include: anything specific to your product, your category, your customer insights, your tooling, your business strategy, or your confidential information. That all belongs to you and stays confidential.
We definitely sign NDAs. To start a conversation, we sign Mutual NDAs, to see if there’s a project fit.
Once we mutually decide to work together, we have a Master Service Agreement that includes all the non-disclosure protections you’d find in a standalone NDA, so you’re still covered once we’re working together. We also keep NDAs in place with our overseas vendors and factory partners, which lets us share your confidential information with them quickly and securely when the project calls for it. And if you’d like an NDA signed before our first conversation, we’re happy to do that too.
Yes — though we’re not a law firm and don’t give legal advice. What we do is prepare patent-ready collateral and collaborate directly with your patent attorney.
That collateral includes product renderings, technical illustrations, CAD models, exploded views, prototype documentation, and functional diagrams — the visuals that communicate how an invention works and what makes it new. We work alongside IP attorneys to make sure the core functionality and design intent come through accurately in the application. Depending on the product, you might pursue utility patents (how it works), design patents (how it looks), or trademarks (brand names and identities).
A few things we tell founders openly. First, a patent is one part of a larger business strategy — branding, speed to market, manufacturing quality, distribution, and execution are often more defensible than the patent itself. Second, be careful filing too early. Products evolve a lot through prototyping, testing, and DFM, and filing too soon can mean protecting the wrong version of the idea. Third, a patent is only as valuable as your ability and willingness to defend it. We encourage clients to talk to a qualified IP attorney early and build a strategy that fits both the product and the business.
As products move toward manufacturing, protecting confidential information gets more important. That’s part of why we manage factory communication early on — it protects your IP during supplier outreach and safeguards our long-standing factory relationships. Once you’re at production readiness and sampling approval, we facilitate direct factory introductions so you can move efficiently into manufacturing.
No. We don’t take equity in exchange for design services.In rare cases, with the right client and the right product, we’ll consider a royalty arrangement based on product sales. These opportunities are evaluated on a case-by-case basis and are reserved for select partnerships rather than being a standard offering.
When considering a royalty arrangement, we look beyond the product itself. Successful launches require strong execution across manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and sales, so we want to understand the broader commercialization strategy before entering into that type of partnership.
Section 7 — Sourcing & Manufacturing
Yes. Over more than a decade of work, Trailside Creative has built an extensive network of factory partners across multiple categories and geographies. For the right project, we can connect you with manufacturers we’ve worked with before and trust — saving you the months of cold outreach, factory visits, and vetting that founders typically have to do alone.
When a project needs a factory partner we don’t already work with, we can also start the process of finding, qualifying, and vetting new partners on your behalf. This work runs through Phase 5 and is scoped against your specific category, volume, target cost, and geography.
You’re not locked into our factories. We have strong relationships with many manufacturers and we’re glad to make introductions, but for established brands that already have a supply chain, it’s often smarter to use the network you’ve already built — it saves time and cost.
In many of those cases, your factory is already a partner to your brand and handles much of the DFM work directly. That actually reduces the cost of bringing us on, because the factory manages Phase 4. Here, Trailside typically works on an hourly retainer to shepherd the design through DFM — making sure the design intent is protected and carried cleanly into production, even when we’re not the ones running the factory floor.
Both, and we tailor design decisions to your supply chain rather than the other way around.
We’ve worked internationally our entire careers, and the honest reality is that for most product categories, costs in Asia are significantly lower than equivalent domestic production. When clients are optimizing for cost of goods, we help them capture that savings through trusted suppliers and factory partners we already work with.
When domestic production makes more sense — shorter lead times, smaller minimum order quantities, reduced shipping cost and complexity, or geopolitical considerations like tariffs and trade policy — we have a strong domestic network too. For soft goods, our short list includes Way Out West and CustomFab, with several more on call. For hard goods, the network is deep across injection molding, machining, and assembly. We keep an internal database of suppliers and partners across categories and geographies, so when a project starts, we can match the manufacturing approach to the design intent without spending months on cold outreach.
One thing worth knowing: the design itself can shift based on where it’s getting built. Tooling capabilities, material availability, labor structure, and process precision all differ between Asia and domestic factories. Knowing your supply chain target early lets us make the right engineering decisions from the first sketch — not after CAD is locked.
In early product development, speed, clarity, and technical control matter more than the volume of options on the table. We typically start with a small, vetted group — sometimes a single lead factory — so we can establish a strong technical baseline.
Going wide too early creates fragmented communication, inconsistent feedback loops, and premature sharing of evolving design details with vendors who may never be selected. It also protects your IP by limiting exposure until we know which partners are serious contenders.
Yes. We regularly build multi-factory comparisons, but in a structured way — focused group first, then expanded once we understand the real manufacturing methods required, realistic cost ranges, MOQ expectations, and capability fit. Pricing collected this way is meaningful and stable. Early-stage estimates almost always shift once the real product is defined.
It balances three things that pull against each other early in development: speed and efficiency, IP and technical protection, and supplier selection quality. By the time multiple factories are involved, the product is defined well enough that pricing and production discussions actually mean something. Most experienced product development environments work this way for a reason.
In the early stages, we manage factory communication directly to keep direction clean and controlled. When clients are looped in too early, we consistently see the same problems: conflicting instructions reaching the factory, repeated clarification loops, overcommunication with vendors who may never be selected, and lost efficiency across the development process.
We act as the technical filter so factories receive consolidated, accurate direction.
Once a factory becomes a serious candidate for production. That typically means the product design is stable, initial samples or costing are validated, the factory has demonstrated genuine capability fit, and we’re moving toward production planning or scaling.
At that point, direct communication adds real value, and we encourage it.
Early-stage introductions create confusion more often than clarity. Most factories interpret early outreach as a commitment, even when the design is still evolving — which leads to misaligned expectations, premature pricing conversations, unnecessary back-and-forth, and relationship friction with suppliers we may not ultimately choose. The cleanest way to protect those relationships is to introduce the factory when there’s something real to discuss.
Yes. Once we move into production-level discussions, clients typically come into factory communications directly. By then the design is locked, the factory is selected, and the value of direct communication — alignment between client expectations, factory execution, and final production decisions — outweighs the friction it would have caused earlier.
Often, yes. Once a product is validated and moving into scaling, it’s common to add secondary suppliers for pricing leverage, backup production capacity, regional diversification, or volume support. This typically happens after the core development phase is complete, not during early iteration.
Section 8 — Production, Quality & Prototyping
Because tooling is expensive, slow, and unforgiving — and a design that looks correct in CAD can fail in the hand. Until something has been built in the physical world, you don’t actually know what you have.
So we prototype rigorously before any factory work begins. The goal is to validate fit, function, ergonomics, and assembly in physical reality before committing to tools that cost real money and time to build. Catching a failure at the prototype stage is dramatically cheaper than catching it after tooling — often by a factor of ten or more once you account for tool revision costs, lost factory queue time, and the cascading schedule impact.
For most hard goods projects, we cycle through several rounds of printed or machined prototypes before any CAD goes to a factory for tooling. By the time the factory sees the design, the hard problems have already been surfaced and solved internally.
Yes — and it’s one of the bigger ways we differ from agencies that outsource early prototyping. Our Hill Country studio is built to take a design from sketch to physical sample without leaving the building.
Hard goods. Multiple 3D printers running both plastics and metals, plus CNC machining access for parts that need to be cut from stock. We put physical hard goods parts in the team’s hands in days, not weeks.
Soft goods. Multiple industrial sewing machines, pattern-making capability, and the workspace to construct physical mockups of backpacks, technical apparel, tents, and other sewn products. We pattern, cut, and sew right here in the studio.
The practical impact is speed and cost. On hard goods, we get tangible parts in front of the team the same week a CAD model is ready. On soft goods, in-house sewing often replaces an entire round of factory sampling — saving both the sampling cost and the weeks of lead time it would have taken.
It depends heavily on what kind of product you’re building and how complex the prototype needs to be — but here’s how the ranges generally break down.
Hard goods. A one-off, fully functional hard goods prototype typically runs $15,000 to $50,000. Simpler parts sit at the lower end. Products requiring custom electronics, machined metal components, or multiple iterations of fit and function testing push toward the upper end.
Soft goods. Soft goods prototypes typically run $5,000 to $25,000. A simpler backpack or sewn accessory sits at the lower end. A complex technical pack with multiple constructions, hardwareintegration, or a heavy collateral build (patterns, tech packs, hardware specs) lands higher in the range.
Three variables move these numbers more than anything else: the stage you’re entering the project at, the manufacturing process the prototype needs to mimic, and the location of the vendors making the parts. A printed-and-assembled internal prototype costs very differently than a factory-built engineering sample.
The honest answer for any specific project is “let’s talk.” We’ll scope the prototype budget against what you actually need to validate.
Tooling costs vary dramatically by product type, and the hard goods vs. soft goods split is the first thing to understand.
Hard goods. Tooling for hard goods can run anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000, and sometimes higher depending on the complexity of the parts, the number of cavities, the materials being molded, and the precision required. A simple injection-molded part with a single cavity sits at the lower end. A complex multi-cavity tool, a multi-shot mold, or specialized tooling like silicone or metal die casting can push well past the upper end.
Soft goods. Tooling for soft goods is dramatically less — typically $5,000 to $15,000 — because soft goods rely on patterns, dies, hardware specifications, and sewing fixtures rather than injection molds or castings. That’s one of the structural cost advantages of soft goods development: lower tooling means faster, cheaper revision cycles when something needs to change.
The same three variables apply here as everywhere else in product development: where you’re entering the process, the manufacturing process the part requires, and where the factory sits. Tooling done in Asia is typically less expensive than equivalent tooling done domestically, but lead times, communication overhead, and revision cycles factor into the real total cost.
Tooling is one of the largest single line items in any hard goods program, which is why we put so much effort into validating a design before tools get cut. The cost of a tool revision after the fact is dramatically higher than the cost of catching the issue in a prototype.
Tool-safe is how we design hard goods parts so that minor refinements to fit and finish can be made after the tool is cut, without scrapping the tool and starting over.
Tooling is expensive and slow — building an entirely new tool can mean weeks of lost time and tens of thousands of dollars. By designing tool-safe from the start, we preserve the ability to make small adjustments — surface refinements, fit tweaks, minor geometry changes — bymodifying the existing tool rather than rebuilding it. Entirely new tooling is only required in rare cases.
This is one of the quieter but most expensive-to-get-wrong parts of hard goods design, and it’s a discipline that comes from experience. It saves clients real money over the life of a product.
Sample-stage changes are a normal and expected part of the process — they’re how a design gets refined from “production-ready” to “market-ready.” How much time and money a change costs depends on whether you’re working in soft goods or hard goods.
Soft goods. Most changes are quick. Adding a zipper, a pocket, an opening, or adjusting a panel typically means a minor update to the tech pack and a fresh sample from the factory. Turnaround is often one to two weeks.
Hard goods. Most changes involve tooling, which takes longer and costs more. Tooling adjustments can run four to six weeks before a new sample is in hand. We plan for this from the start, which is why we design hard goods parts to be “tool-safe.”
In both cases, sample-driven refinement is a normal and valuable part of the process. We’d rather catch issues at the sample stage than after production.
Phase 5 is where we help take your validated, production-ready design and get it through manufacturing and into the market. Typical Phase 5 activities include: Factory sourcing and qualification, technical correspondence with the factory through sampling and tooling, liaison support between your team and the factory through ramp-up, sample reviews and revision direction, production-stage problem solving, and ongoing project management through to first commercial production.
Some clients use a lot of our Phase 5 hours; others use almost none, especially if they have internal supply chain capability or an existing factory relationship. Because every product and every factory situation is different, Phase 5 is always billed hourly rather than scoped as a fixed package.
Yes — and we structure these in two ways depending on what your project needs.At the Trailside office. We conduct golden sample reviews and first article inspections at our studio in Texas. Samples are shipped to us, we review them against the design intent, the tech pack, and the tooling drawings, and we provide documented feedback for the factory.
At the factory. For higher-stakes projects, we can send a Trailside team member to the factory — either before production release or during the production run — to inspect parts on-site, evaluate the factory’s processes, and make sure the parts are being made correctly. There’s significant cost to sending someone overseas, but for many projects it’s the right call. A trained eye at the factory has caught issues that would have cost ten times more to fix after the fact.
Both. Production oversight, golden sample reviews, and factory inspections are most often included as part of our Phase 5 proposals, but we can also engage on these as standalone services — even for products we didn’t originally design.
If you’ve designed your product elsewhere or in-house and just need experienced eyes on the production process, we’re happy to step in for that scope.
We work alongside them, not over them. When a client has internal QC capability or an existing sourcing partner, our role is to help equip them for success.
That typically means developing the testing protocols, defining the QC inspection plan, and walking them through the design intent behind the product — what each part needs to do, what the critical tolerances are, what to look for during testing, and what failure modes to watch for. The goal is for your QC team to inspect against the same standards we would, with the same understanding of why each one matters.
We design with your target Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and landed cost in mind from the first sketch. During Groundwork and Discovery, we establish clear financial guardrails — your target retail price, target landed cost, gross margin expectations, and the manufacturing methods that can realistically deliver them. Those numbers become design constraints, the same way ergonomics or regulatory requirements are constraints.
Through sketching, CAD modeling, and DFM, we continuously evaluate how design decisions impact manufacturing cost — part count, material selection, tooling complexity, assembly time,finishing operations, packaging. Most of a product’s cost gets locked in at the design stage, not the factory floor. Once tooling is cut, your COGS is largely committed.
If a design direction is going to push the product past your target price, we flag it early and propose alternatives. Sometimes that means a different material, a different manufacturing process, a different factory geography, or a different assembly approach. Sometimes it means having an honest conversation about whether the target price is realistic for the product you actually want to build. We’d rather have that conversation in Phase 2 than after tooling.
We guarantee what we can control: that we’ll do our due diligence during the design process, that we’ll prototype and validate internally to a high standard, and that we’ll be available to help troubleshoot problems if and when they arise.
What we cannot guarantee is that production parts coming off a factory line will meet every functional and testing requirement. Once parts leave our office and enter the factory’s production system, the variables that affect final quality are out of our control — material lots, process drift, operator decisions, supplier substitutions, and dozens of other factors that influence what comes off the line.
This is one of the reasons we recommend factory visits, golden sample reviews, and ongoing production support — they’re how good designs survive contact with manufacturing reality.
Section 9 — Post-Launch Support & Long-Term Partnership
Yes. Trailside is built to help at every stage of a product’s life, including manufacturing and commercialization.
Our team carries more than 75 years of cumulative product development experience across the bike, action sports, outdoor, hunting, and fishing industries. That experience matters most in the later phases, when a finalized design has to survive contact with factory reality — sampling, tooling, materials sourcing, quality control, and the dozen small problems that surface between a prototype and the first production run. Founders who try to bridge that gap alone, without a partner who has done it before, often lose months and budget to avoidable mistakes.
We can stay engaged at whatever level fits your situation — from light advisory hours to full hands-on factory liaison work.
We help. Our involvement after launch is to diagnose the issue, communicate directly with the factory, and — if design modifications are necessary — help with the redesign work.
This work falls under what we call Phase 6: Beyond Production Support. It’s conducted on a Time and Materials (T&M) basis so you only pay for the actual hours required, not for a retainer you may or may not use. The structure keeps it easy to engage us when an issue surfaces, without locking you into ongoing fees during periods when production is running smoothly.
If a part breaks more than expected, or an ergonomic problem only shows up at scale, we’re available to help with redesigns. We’re fully responsible for the work we produce, and we take that seriously.
That said, a lot can change with a design after it leaves our office — material substitutions at the factory, process drift, supplier changes, real-world use cases nobody anticipated. So our standing offer is straightforward: if something needs to be fixed, we’re available to help fix it. Whether that’s a quick tooling tweak or a deeper redesign, we’ll work with you to get the product back on track.
Both — and we’re built for the long term. Phase 6, Beyond Production Support, is our long-term, post-launch support phase, conducted on a Time and Materials basis. It covers manufacturing defect diagnosis, factory communication, design troubleshooting, and field-issue redesigns — the work that comes up months or years after a product ships.
Trailside Creative has been around since 2012 and was incorporated in 2018, and our team carries more than 75 cumulative years of product development experience across the bike, action sports, outdoor, hunting, and fishing industries. Our belief in building relationships means we’ll be here when you need us — whether that’s to troubleshoot something during production next week, support a line extension next quarter, or kick off an entirely new product program eighteen months from now
Yes. The majority of our clients return for additional projects. At Trailside Creative, we believe the relationship is the thing. If the relationship is good, the work tends to take care of itself — and if the business part doesn’t make sense for a given project, we’re still happy to go grab a drink together. People hire those they know, like, and trust. We doour best to earn all three before any engagement starts, and we’re committed to delivering excellence on every project that follows.
In practice, most clients return for three or four projects, sometimes more. What often starts as a single workshop or a focused project turns into something larger — revamping an entire product category, creating a new category, or building out a brand new product line. Repeat work usually comes after the successful close of an engagement, though it’s not unusual for additional projects to get added mid-engagement when momentum is high.
Yes. We think of ourselves as design partners rather than an outside agency, and we work hard to be genuinely collaborative with the brands we serve. For some clients, that relationship runs deep enough that they list Trailside Creative on their own websites as their official design agency of record.
There’s no one-size-fits-all structure for this. Some clients work with us on a project-by-project basis with consistent re-engagement. Others move into hourly retainers when the cadence of work calls for it. We build the engagement model to fit the relationship rather than forcing the relationship into a template.
Yes. We want to see great products come to market, and we want to help brands serve their customers well — whether that means designing something new from scratch or refining and extending what they already have.
A few of the ways we work on existing product lines:
Line extensions and V2 work. We regularly design products that continue an existing line or fill gaps in a brand’s portfolio. This work depends heavily on understanding the brand’s Visual Brand Language (VBL) — the shared design vocabulary across products that signals “this belongs to us.” Maintaining a strong visual tie between products is one of the things we pay closest attention to.
Product line strategy workshops. We host strategy sessions to help clients decide what they should make next — identifying gaps, prioritizing opportunities, and aligning new products with existing line direction.
White label audits. This is one of our more specialized services. We take off-the-shelf (OTS) products directly from a factory, evaluate them against the client’s brand and design language, and propose design updates that make the OTS product fit the brand’s aesthetic. White label audits are an efficient way to expand a product line without the cost of designing from zero.
OTS component sourcing. Sometimes clients come to us looking for off-the-shelf parts to incorporate into a larger design. We help find OTS components that fit the project’s requirements — keeping costs down while preserving the brand’s intended look and performance.
The throughline across all of these: there’s almost always a more efficient path to a great product than starting from a blank sheet. We help clients find it.
