Sam Birchenough Sam Birchenough

Shop Talk with Autodesk

I had the great pleasure of chatting with Autodesk about the future of design & manufacturing, and a bit about what we’re doing here at BDH!

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Sam Birchenough Sam Birchenough

BDH is Eight Years Old

What a contrast to last years update.

BDH did rise from the ashes, resulting from a highly concentrated effort to level up. This included revamping our engagement structure to be more client focused than ever, onboarding new technology, working with new vendors, and moving office locations. We’ve delivered six end-to-end product development projects to happy clients and had our best financial year ever. Additionally, we’ve continued development on our current internal project launch, Lair.

Thank you to our long-term clients who chose to continue to work with us, and to our new clients who chose to engage with us for their product design needs.

We’re going to continue delivering great working relationships and massive value in 2024.

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Sam Birchenough Sam Birchenough

Guide to 3D Printing Technologies & Materials

Our friends at Formlabs have put together this helpful video and guide to help you understand various 3D printing methods and available material properties. At BDH, we have FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), SLA (Stereolithography), and SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) 3D printers.

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Sam Birchenough Sam Birchenough

Deal Structure: Introducing a Lower Cost of Entry to Engage Us

All except one of our past clients started as a fixed fee, defined scope of work deal. Most of our fixed fee client projects have been in $20k - $150k range. Some of those clients with ongoing product development pipelines converted to a monthly retainer model.

I’m going to flip the deal structure a bit and start offering $20k - $30k monthly retainer deals to new clients. On our end, I’m hoping this increases conversion and reduces time spent selling so we can spend more time designing. On the clients end, this lowers the cost to engage our firm and gives freedom for changing needs at a defined product development capital expenditure.

We schedule projects and capacity in a way where our quality of work, timelines, and client relationships are at the highest level (just see what our past clients have to say). This will not change.

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Sam Birchenough Sam Birchenough

Designer? Engineer? Product Design?

The terminology in design.. It’s a confusing world. “Product design,” “designer,” and “engineer” all get thrown around loosely with a wide array of intended definitions. The software and hardware worlds have been fighting to claim the terms & normalize them as their own. No doubt, good design translates across industries. A talented designer can excel in products, app design, websites, landscapes, architecture, etc. A great engineer can understand structures, programming, electronic devices, etc. That said, software and hardware design generally have quite different skillsets, workflows, and outputs.

So how do we define what we do? We help bring ideas to market in the hardware space. I suppose the proper terms are “industrial design” (another misnomer of sorts) & mechanical engineering. Product design is the logical, all encompassing description of what we do, but the software tech industry will fight me on that..

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