Small Company In-House Design
Have deep involvement with a brand, research, and the full design process.
Product shot of a bike-to-work cyclist. Photo provided by Lindsay Malatesta, Senior Industrial Designer, Bern Helmets in the Dumbo-area of Brooklyn, New York.
Lindsay Malatesta, Senior Industrial Designer, Bern Helmets in Brooklyn, NY
A little about Lindsay Malatesta, Senior Industrial Designer at Bern Helmets in Dumbo Brooklyn, New York.
Lindsay Malatesta is a Senior Industrial Designer who is passionate about using design to tell users' stories through ethical and equitable products. Lindsay graduated with a Bachelor of Science, B.S. in Industrial Design from Wentworth Institute of Technology in Spring 2014.
She believes design is a way to bring more joy to the world and that happiness can come out of anything from accessible toys to medical devices that improve patient outcomes. Lindsay has a wide breadth of work experience spanning hard and soft goods, toys, medical devices, and outdoor gear. Her passion is using design to tell stories and advocates for diverse and inclusive research to ensure the design world makes better products for more people. As a professional in the outdoor industry, she has dedicated her expertise to creating more equitable and accessible outdoors as well as pushing the industry standards for eco-friendly products forward.
Outside of work, Lindsay focuses on using design and her passions to enact positive change whether through volunteering for non-profits like Science Delivered or through the creation and curation of Unif-ID space for women and non-binary industrial designers. Lindsay’s work with Unif-ID is a true gift that keeps on giving, she’s created something special—a safe space for designers to connect, thrive, and support one another.
Follow along Lindsay’s Journey working at a Small Company with In-House Design.
I am an in-house designer for an outdoor sports safety company. As the Senior Industrial Designer on a small team, my job is to bring products from inception to manufacturing by working closely with our project manager, sales/marketing, and the manufacturer.
Our production process takes roughly two years from project start, so we work on different seasons in parallel (winter and summer products). If I’m not designing new products, I’m testing old products to ensure customer satisfaction, figure out if we need a color refresh, sourcing more sustainable materials, and more. My work was always in a remote office in Dumbo to our HQ in Plymouth, so working from home wasn’t a huge switch and is now our design team’s permanent setup.
“We’ve gotten through things by communicating a lot and sometimes having a rooftop distanced review session! ”
A view from the design and creative studio. Photo provided by Lindsay Malatesta, Senior Industrial Designer, Bern Helmets in the Dumbo-area of Brooklyn, New York.
A company this size requires wearing a lot of hats, but these are the general responsibilities for an industrial designer:
The New Development: traditional 2-year process with research, development phase, testing phase, and manufacturing phase
The Line Architecture Management: adjusting the available product to ensure we’re showing our best products, removing old models which no longer suit our company goals, and improving our color and finish offerings for the helmets
The Improvements: Finding areas of improvement on existing models (i.e., a product with a lot of customer complaints about fit will go through user testing to find and implement necessary changes for the upcoming production season)
Working at a small company has allowed me to have a lot of control over the work that we choose to do.
I work closely with our whole company to make sure we're all working together towards our company goals, and I often get to lead the conversation about where we should be moving as a company with our product development. Part of my role is to help improve the development process by working with our project manager.
This role has a lot of autonomy and because of that, I was able to overhaul the development process while creating a new helmet with more insights and sustainable materials than the company had ever used before. Through working in tandem with the product manager, we adjusted our development calendar, organized our available products, and added in a much-needed research phase. The ultimate result is that we’re now producing products that appeal to more people and ultimately can make them more comfortable to be adventurous in the outdoors.
“The research phase is invaluable, not only to good design, but also to our sales and marketing teams who were able to take on the information about personas and adjust their methods.”
Captured process and evaluating two of their Bern Helmets outside. Photo provided by Lindsay Malatesta, Senior Industrial Designer, Bern Helmets in the Dumbo-area of Brooklyn, New York.
A small company has its own quirks
—the budgets can be fairly light especially for extra research and user testing and often design work is fairly insular because you may be the only designer at a company this size.
The two-year development process also means you won’t get that instant gratification of seeing your product on the shelves and your product spends a lot of time out of your hands in 3rd party safety testing.
All that said, however, the size means the job is what you make it so if you want to step up and make significant changes, updates, or suggestions a small company will often afford you that ability.
“Women who want to enjoy the outdoors, but feel underrepresented in the products offered to them will also feel that benefit in designs made under teams that represent all who enjoy the outdoors.”
Especially in the world of safety, designing for the outdoors is really rewarding. We get stories all the time of people who have survived crashes or whose children cracked their ski helmets but came out unscathed.
It’s incredibly gratifying to see the direct effect good design can have, especially when it’s protecting what’s most important. While the outdoor industry is overwhelmingly male, the outdoors are for everyone and I hope that design teams in this industry grow to reflect that (and I think they're starting to).
The female perspective adds value to teams that traditionally skew demographically homogenous, but it's not just a design team that will benefit from a new perspective. It's exciting to help be a part of that change!
A view of Lindsay’s work from home, pandemic creative studio. Photo provided by Lindsay Malatesta, Senior Industrial Designer, Bern Helmets in the Dumbo-area of Brooklyn, New York.
THANK YOU, Lindsay, FOR GIVING US A GLIMPSE INTO YOUR CAREER & WORK AS AN INSPIRING WOMAN IN DESIGN.
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