Products. Brands. Possibilities.Retail partnerships
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Product innovation & engineering

Question the everyday.
Improve the answer.

Three glass clamp-lid canisters with bamboo lids holding oats, chickpeas and rice
Product-source reference / form & function

We explore how familiar products can work, feel and fit into everyday life more thoughtfully—then develop around manufacturing reality.

Discuss product development

A practical design standard

Innovation with a
reason to exist.

We create products around unmet needs, category opportunities and better ways of doing familiar things. We are not interested in adding features simply to call something new.

  1. Useful

    A clear consumer reason to exist.

  2. Differentiated

    Features, materials and form working together.

  3. Manufacturable

    A credible path through sampling, tooling and production.

  4. Commercially viable

    A product that makes sense for the intended retail program.

  5. Scalable

    Built to be made repeatedly, at the quality intended.

  6. Protectable

    Differentiation developed with intellectual property in mind, where appropriate.

Development across objects

A vase, a lid, a candle,
a bath set.

Silhouette studies, color and finish samples, form studies, prototypes and packaging structures—the same discipline applied to very different products.
  • Machined metal components resting on engineering drawings
    CAD + drawings / representative process
  • A navy ceramic vase with a rippled, wave-like form on a wood slice
    Form + silhouette
  • A board of ceramic glaze test tiles in a workshop
    Glaze samples / representative process
  • Cardboard and metal prototype components on white
    Prototypes / representative process
  • Six matte jar lids fanned out in olive, terracotta, blue, mocha, mustard and sage
    Lid + color studies
  • A flat lay of wood, stone, textile and paint samples
    Material swatches / representative process
  • A row of cherub-form candles in pastel colors on a stone tray
    Candle form studies
  • A plain kraft box, linen pouch and tube on a white set
    Packaging structure / representative process
  • A white dimpled ceramic soap dispenser with a bamboo pump on black stone
    Bath collection development

Imagery mixes ZIV brand development work, manufacturing-partner references and licensed images of representative processes. Partner facilities are not ZIV-owned, and representative images do not depict a specific ZIV partner or product.

Development process

Better products begin before the factory.

ZIV can develop original concepts, mechanisms, constructions, materials and product systems—then engineer them around manufacturability, economics and retail reality.
  1. Insight
  2. Concept
  3. Mechanical direction
  4. Prototype
  5. Refinement
  6. Factory engineering
  7. Tooling
  8. Validation
  9. Production

Intellectual property

Designed with
defensibility in mind.

ZIV considers design, utility and brand intellectual property as part of the development process. ZIV is actively developing proprietary product concepts and evaluating design and utility patent protection across selected innovations.

Protection status is evaluated program by program.

We don’t begin with what the factory already makes. We begin with what the product should become.

Let’s build the next program

Have a product opportunity?

Retail and brand partners: bring the category or the consumer friction. We’ll talk through how a program could be developed.

Discuss a product opportunity