Houses are much more similar to each other than products. If you've built a few houses, you can probably find many more customers who will want similar houses. Most people don't care if their house is essentially the same as somebody's on the other side of town.
But a new product must offer something that's not found in the existing products on the market. If it doesn't, then there's no reason to go to all the effort of getting it manufactured — customers could just buy the existing products where all that investment was made already and is largely recouped.
So an industrial design product is more like the houses you see on the "Grand Designs" TV show. Each of them represents a dream and a vision, and usually there's a lot of trouble and blown budgets on the way to the grand finale where the family finally gets to sit together by the fireplace in their unique creation. ("Grand Designs" doesn't show the dream projects that fail miserably.)
Houses that are the same as ones across town are cheaper as the builder has experience with it and knows the tricks to build it with less labor. They also are designed with years of feedback about what other like and dislike. They don't have weird corners that are not usable because after putting things in that is what fit.
how is it then the case that there are multiple versions of products on the market that differ very little from each other?
Let's say you want to sell plastic brooms. With such a common product, what possible competitive edge could you get by creating your own design from scratch? If your reason for getting in the business is that you want to address a niche or trend (e.g. you want to sell hot pink brooms because it's Barbie summer of 2023), that can be accomplished with an existing design. It only makes sense to create new molds for a broom if you're a corporation like Ikea with the massive sales volume that enables vertical integration of every aspect of the product.
You subcontract to various manufacturing companies — companies also being used by your competitors. Those companies have standard "best practice" ways of doing certain things, and they tell you that your design will be executed a lot more cheaply if they're allowed to nudge it toward conforming with those best practices, so that they can use standard parts and techniques.
Iterate this three or four times — especially in the context of a company that's plateaued in market share and is now all about cost optimization — and eventually you have a version of your product which is indistinguishable from your competitors' products. That's what allows for the best economies of scale up the pipeline, and therefore saves you and your competitors the most money.
In a way it's like forking a software project: the more you deviate from what's done before, the more 'pain' you'll be in.
What's done before can be re-done by any competent builder.
But beyond that, you'll need expertise in different fields, to fit parts of a design together in new ways.
No expertise -> project will fail, or be extremely 'painful' (like: costly, time-consuming, many iterations, result isn't what you wanted, etc).
Enough expertise -> steps in new territory might be uncomfortable or include some mistakes, but overall you'd know where you're at, where you're going & have realistic expectations.
So yeah - nothing wrong with getting some expert help when entering new territory.
That assumes part availability, though. There were kit-built octagon-shaped homes in the 1800s; but good luck asking a builder to build you one today.
Great analogy, seriously. As a big fan of that program (cathartic if you have any real state project going on) let me add that I have seen programs in which the house is not finished after 8 years; some in which rooms projected for kids are not needed because they are going to college; and couples that start together, and by the end of the program are divorced (or one of them passed) by the end of the program. It really puts things into context.
Also, my favourite, when 80% of the participants casually say they want to be in by Christmas, summer vacations, New years next year, and the host smiles and says something like (let's see).
That's the thing that I would expect here: that the firm you'd hire would come with a built-in person to look at your design and say "no, this isn't gonna work, try again."
Reputable product manufacturers actually do have that person.
There absolutely are such places. They're called product development companies, and I work for one. We do just about everything, which is nice for people who like variety!
Can you name some companies in the space? I'm curious to know more.
https://metric-designworks.com/
Looks like a very humble site/company, but then you see that they have Teenage Engineering as one of their clients, in addition to Microsoft, etc.
When I have dreams of having a cool successful kickstarter around some quirky hardware musical instrument I’d invent, I definitely see myself reaching out to a company like that..!
When I imagine a company (rather than an individual or "brand") that sets out to get a product manufactured, what they likely already have — and so don't want to pay for the redundant employment of — is in-house IxD and general hardware and product engineering expertise. This is the type of talent that's easy to hire for in pretty much any developed country; so it's who they've probably hired at the very beginning of the product development lifecycle.
What such companies don't necessarily have, is 1. domain expertise in engineering the specific type of product and the parts that make it up (because this may be the first time they're entering this particular space); and 2. ground-level "systems engineering of logistical pipelines" knowledge of how to best put the plants, mills, factories, shipping, etc. of a particular region to use.
Big companies like Apple "vertically integrate downward", extending themselves into their chosen manufacturing region, getting boots on the ground for months/years to grow in-house expertise these fields, perhaps headhunting engineers and foremen directly from the factories to oversee things "from their side" but still local to production, etc.
But small companies don't have anyone to send to the manufacturing region. They want to draw the line "on the ocean." What they want, is to find a company local to the manufacturing region, that has taken the sort of local-logistics-oversight and part-specific-engineering competencies that were developed locally as a response to the demands of these big clients, and "struck out on their own", white-labelling this capacity as a service to be provided to anyone willing to pay for it.
To go back to the "general contractor" analogy, these smaller companies are like commercial property developers who already have architects and structural engineers working for them; who are looking to get a design of theirs built in an entirely different country; and who are looking for a construction company (that employs its own general contractor, who will be the property developer's point-of-contact) in that country. The property developer's structural engineer can say whether the building is safe in a technical sense, but they will rely on the construction company to evaluate whether the building is up to code for the area of the world it's actually going to be built in; and therefore to push back on the property developer to get things changed, when the building "won't work" as planned. They'll also rely on the construction company to guide them toward materials and parts choices that are most idiomatic for the chosen area, and most efficient and abundant in the construction company's own supply chain.
I do realize that a product development company might be willing to do a lower-level job like this. But the fact that a firm like yours employs its own product and design and high-level engineering staff (at least, I presume), probably means your firm has higher running costs than a firm that didn't have those staff; and therefore needs to charge an amount that might be untenable to smaller clients who only need that lower-level kind of support.
Which, again, leads me to wonder why there's no kind of company specifically targeting that "vertical slice" of the logistics chain — being only the gluing know-how to bring together on-shore "product developers" who have no off-shore experience/relationships, with the off-shore low-level manufacturing they need to use to make their product real. If a company that was only this existed, I would bet that it would be a "best practice" for small product companies to use them, instead of trying to send their designs off to factories themselves!
And again, I'll state my hypothesis: this glue is so core to the value of many of these products — especially lower-BOM ones — that any company that starts out just providing this service, inevitably vertically integrates upward until they are a product development company; or even becomes a product company themselves. At which point they leave the low-margin "cross-shore oversight" jobs behind — or start charging as much for them as they do for the full-spectrum development jobs.
And once you're hiring skilled practitioners, the space you've envisioned for a glue company has been squeezed out. We bill by the hour, and we'll do small jobs. Would you rather hire us to make your PCB or someone who's never soldered?
And as for us hiring that sort of person, they're already employed at the contract manufacturers (and unavoidable, the CMs don't really like to work without it). No reason to duplicate that layer. Understanding the role of CMs is critical to understanding modern volume manufacturing.
What's to like about outsourcing it. It's parallelizable so you can work on your core competency while they work. Core competency, this is your angle that allows you to make money. How to lose money, working on stuff outside that. They get it done faster and without fuckups. And the outputs are something you can just give to a manufacturer. If there is an issue the two of them hash it out not you.
Only thing not to like is the wad of cash you need to cough up. But really if you don't have that you're hosed anyways. And paying to get revenue coming in a couple of months sooner is so worth it.
There are design companies who do exactly this. You can go to them with a very generic problem like “design our fall shoe collection” or a very specific one “this bearing in this gizmo is too noisy, find a better one”. They can cost an arm and a leg but they get the job done.
Which is, honestly, kind of a reasonable assumption. In construction, you hire a general contractor. Why is there no manufacturing equivalent of a general contractor? Because all such people are too busy running their own successful product businesses?