howdoimakemyproduct.com

You have a helmet
in your head.

Stop sketching on napkins. Use the frameworks real product teams use.

The hard part

Getting a physical product to market
is overwhelming.

Twelve steps between a sketch in your head and a product on a shelf. Most people stall on step one — and never get to step two.

Step one is the one that matters. Get that right and the rest falls into place.

Here's step one

A real product brief.

The same brief consultancies charge for — built from 15 years of product work and packaged into a tool. Five sliders, a few competitor URLs, five minutes. Free.

Persona + JTBD

Who buys this and the job they're hiring it to do. Not a demographic — a specific person and a specific moment.

Competitor map

Where they're strong, where they're weak, where the white space lives. The wedge you're moving into.

Strategic insights

Tied to real journey pain points and competitor weaknesses. Each one points at a feature decision you can act on.

Kano feature list

Must-have, performance, delighter — prioritised so you know what to build first and what to defer.

LD

Need more help?

Ask me anything for an hour.

Once your brief is built, the questions get specific — tooling cost, materials, supplier intros, where the design will trip up. That's where I come in.

$199/ 60 minutes · NZD

Money back if the session doesn't land a useful answer.

Where I've built thingsGallagher SecurityProduct ManagerMetalformCommercial R&D ManagerBlender DesignIndustrial DesignerPacific HelmetsIndustrial Designer

15+

Years in manufacturing

$1M+

R&D projects led

19

Injection tools commissioned

17

Products launched to market

Real results

Don't take my word for it

I'd been searching for months. Liam came back within the hour with five competitor products I'd never found, and a perspective on global reach. We stopped guessing and started designing for the actual gap in the market.

Sam

Builder and innovator, Auckland

3mo → 1wk

Liam helped us turn a hand-cut prototype into something a manufacturer could actually quote on. He walked us through the part design, sorted the packaging, and made the early factory introductions himself. Saved us months of figuring it out the hard way.

Ferris

Founder, VHS (Velocity Hucking Systems)

Months saved

Most consultants talk in frameworks. Liam talks in injection mould tolerances and BOM line items. That's the difference.

David K.

Startup CTO, Hamilton

Production in 8 weeks

Portfolio

Products I've taken from sketch to shelf

Not concepts. Not renders. Manufactured, shipped, in-market products across agri-tech, robotics, safety gear, and consumer electronics.

Pacific Helmets flagship. Designed shell, exterior chassis, front plinth, buckle, fabric liner, and torch attachments. Commissioned 7 injection-mould tools. NFPA / EN / AS-NZS compliant. Won DINZ Silver 2017.

Lightweight rescue helmet with military-style accessory rails. Designed via iterative sketching and SolidWorks surfacing after analysing the Hong Kong riots — police worldwide needed a rated, lightweight alternative. Won DINZ Gold 2016.

Snap-clip buckle rated from 180 °C to −32 °C. Passes 20 stringent AS/NZS, NFPA, and EN mechanical tests for break points, elongation limits, ease of use, and function at temperature extremes. Designed for gloved one-hand operation.

Body for the Vision 1 ATEX-rated torch. Snaps into the F15 chassis with a forgiving tolerance for shell variation. 100 N assembly, ~260 N removal force. Designed to shatter and disperse on serious impact to protect the wearer.

$1 M flagship R&D project. 4 custom PCBs, CANbus connectivity, world-first variable-rate nozzle design. Electronic remote control designed from scratch.

Electric-powered grounds maintenance equipment. Designed the electronic control system, managed production ramp to market across the US and Europe.

Cross-platform fertiliser calculator for the Tow and Fert range. Built in Flutter for single-codebase deployment to both iOS and Android. Lets operators dial in product, nozzle, and rate to compute application figures on the move.

Autonomous sports field line marker. Full product development from concept through to a 20-unit production run. GPS-guided with custom enclosure design.

Off-grid river monitoring node streaming temperature, turbidity, dissolved O₂, and salinity over LoRaWAN. Custom PCB with four isolated sensor channels, machined aluminium housing, and multi-year battery life for remote catchments.

Cafe-racer-style electric urban bike. Industrial design lead from concept through prototype: frame architecture, battery enclosure, leather/foam seat, lighting integration.

The best solution for chain slap. Part design and retail packaging for the Velocity Hucking Systems chain-stay protector. Featured by GMBN (Best Tech of 2020), Pinkbike (Tech Briefing, Jan 2021), and World of MTB (Best of 2022).

Industrial design for a premium duffel bag — an NZ startup taking aim at Yeti's hold on the rugged carry-bag category. Form, materials, hardware, and zip architecture designed for the long haul.

Tender required a full field trial in 4 weeks. Designed and CNC-machined a single-cavity two-part zinc alloy mold to short-run the part in glass-filled nylon on a bolster. Process informed the final production tool design.

Tower harness and work seat developed through an IRATA rope training course and in-depth interviews with NZ safety stakeholders. Research-led project that sparked a career in safety products and led to Pacific Helmets. Won DINZ Bronze 2013.