PhillyTablet Inquirer Daily News
Mobile
Home Delivery
philly.com

email
font size
comments
0
options
 
Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Bresslergroup designs its own future

Perhaps the only thing harder than building the proverbial better mousetrap for an entrepreneur is knowing when it’s time to step away from the business he created.

Peter R. Bressler, an industrial designer who founded Bresslergroup Inc. of Philadelphia, 40 years ago, has done both.

Over the last two years, Bressler has been transitioning the ownership and management of the 20-employee product-design consultancy to three longtime senior managers: Mike Flanagan (in charge of marketing and strategy), Mathieu Turpault (design), and Andrew Weiman (commercialization and engineering).

Bressler remains chairman and adviser, but he has stepped away from day-to-day operations.

In interviews with all four professionals, I kept hearing the same phrase. All wanted to see Bresslergroup expand to the next level. The goal is to double in size within the next three to five years.

Is that even possible during an economic recovery in which business seems to be stuck in first gear?

Well, considering what Bresslergroup has accomplished over the years with big clients, such as toolmaker Black & Decker Corp. and medical-device-maker Becton Dickinson & Co., that’s not an outlandish ambition.

Bresslergroup has built its own brand in the small professional community that is product design, having amassed 80 design awards and 150 patents. Bressler himself last month received a lifetime-achievement award from the Industrial Designers Society of America trade association.

Large corporations certainly have their own product-design teams. What would Apple Inc. or Ford Motor Co. be without them? But companies also tap outside designers for fresh perspectives, for expertise they may not have in-house, or for flexibility of not adding permanent design staff.

What Bresslergroup does involves more than designing pretty packaging or cool-looking products. After all, these products must be mass-produced. Optimizing manufacturing costs, employing new technology, minimizing raw-material waste, and understanding how customers will use a product are critical to the design process.

Back to that mousetrap. Over the years, Bresslergroup has worked with Woodstream Corp., the Lititz, Pa., company behind the Victor brand of mousetraps. Recently, Bresslergroup redesigned the Victor Quick Set Mousetrap so that Woodstream could reduce assembly and parts costs and bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States from China.

In part, increasing shipping costs and wage rates in China prompted the privately held Woodstream to consider a redesign. Turpault said the project enabled Bresslergroup to demonstrate how companies can build “sustainable” practices into their product lines.

For example, the firm substituted cardboard packaging for the blister packs that had previously encased the mousetraps. Plus, for the trap itself, designers chose a type of plastic that can be recycled rather than tossed in the trash.

Finding ways to limit the environmental impact of products is an area that Turpault says he believes should be a priority. “We are responsible for what is delivered to a landfill as product designers,” he said. “We have a huge impact on the types of materials used and on the packaging.”

Some design houses specialize in only one particular product area, such as consumer electronics. But Bressler has deliberately tried to keep the firm out of pigeonholes, taking on commercial, consumer, and medical products.

That’s how it winds up designing a 10-inch table saw for Black & Decker, a hypodermic safety needle for Becton Dickinson, and a smoke alarm that wakes up children not with beeps but with the sound of their parents’ recorded voices.

“I love the excitement of learning new stuff all the time,” Bressler said.

But product-design firms, like all consulting firms, are among the first to feel when the economy is beginning to crater or climb.

“We tend to be a bellwether,” Bressler said. “When people start to get scared, they cut back on consulting services because they can.”

Flanagan said that business had been going like “gangbusters” in 2007. But that changed in early 2008, when clients slowed down projects or halted them completely.

Thus, 2008 was the “pit of despair,” Weiman said. “There was no place to go but up.”

Fortunately, product designers are among the early beneficiaries of an improving business cycle. The first half of 2010 was pretty good for Bresslergroup, Weiman said. The outlook for the second half remains unclear.

What’s crystal clear is that this move by the 64-year-old Bressler is not being made out of a desire to retire.

In fact, after 40 years of designing things for others, Bressler said he had learned something: “Unbeknownst to myself, I seem to be an entrepreneur.”

He’s the chairman of SRS Energy, which is trying to commercialize Bresslergroup-designed solar-power roofing tiles. SRS has offices next to Bresslergroup’s studio in the basement of the Marketplace Design Center at 24th and Market Streets.

Bressler started to tell me that he has never been bored in 40 years, only to catch himself remembering some lean times.

But I recall his declaration that he had decided a long time ago not to do the same thing all the time, and I wonder whether it isn’t true of this man whose firm finds new ways to catch mice or capture the sun’s rays.
Posted by Mike Armstrong @ 1:33 PM  Permalink | File Under: Small Business | Post a comment
Comments   


0 comments
About Mike Armstrong
Mike Armstrong, a business editor and writer for nearly two decades, is the Inquirer's business columnist and PhillyInc blog editor. Contact Mike via e-mail or at 215-854-2980
Advertise Here