At any point in a calendar year, the building industry and all of its media platforms, is flooded with news of product innovations and inventions that promise to “change the industry”.
The problem is that most of these products aren’t new or innovative, but rather just rehashed versions of last year’s catalogue with minor, superficial changes.
And while in some cases there is no issue with using older tried and tested models, the changing capabilities of designers as well as evolving building codes and product compliance standards means that new products are an absolute necessity for the advancement of the built environment in Australia.
Successful product innovations must therefore be customer driven and involve feedback from those who are actually using them. Otherwise a stagnated Australian building product industry will result, and specifiers will begin to look overseas to fill the product voids on our shores.
And we all know what a market flooded with imported non-conforming building products could amount to…
FAIL FAST METHODOLOGY
Doric Products, Australia's largest privately owned window and door hardware manufacturer, understands all this and their design team work tirelessly to bring new products and upgrades to the market only when they know they will work.
Doric use a ‘fail fast’ product prototype method, where an initial product idea is printed 3D-printed overnight using the very latest industry-grade 3D printer before being shipped off for customer feedback. This methodology ensures that a wider-range of concepts can be explored immediately and that ideas with potential can be amalgamated from various concepts and then improved and developed. It also means that concepts and ideas with less promise are shelved as quickly as possible so as to exhaust no further investment of time and money.
This process is also very customer-centric in that those who are specifying and using Doric’s window and door hardware are the ones providing feedback about concepts and the products that might eventually come to the market. Most importantly, this process ensures that architects and designers do not have to compromise design on the account of product unavailability.
It’s this business strategy and product development that has seen Doric collect multiple Australian Window Association Innovation awards and develop from its birth as a tiny brass window fabricator into the multinational private business servicing the Asia Pacific and North American regions that it is today.
Doric Products offers door and window hardware for residential, commercial and architectural applications, and can provide product exclusivity through their state of the art computerised design process.
Doric designs, prototypes and cycle tests all hardware to ensure they exceed market expectations for product quality.
Click here to download Doric's free accompanying whitepaper.
