TrickleUp Design is a social innovation design firm that imagines and helps bring to life new products, services and systems. From digital to bricks and mortar, local to global solutions, TrickleUp works with clients of all shapes and sizes who want to bring truly innovative ideas to the market.

Potential clients include:

• Companies looking to initiate a new area of business and not only want it on-trend, but also to be a market leader;
• Tech start-ups aiming to gain a more well-rounded understanding of the market before launching their product;
• Not for profit organizations and social enterprises wanting to ensure that their business models are as robust and innovative as the social and environmental missions that inspire their work; and
• Educational institutions, government bodies, and international NGOs looking for socially innovative solutions to working within the emerging market, including creating new products and services that ethically target these new consumers.

WHAT WE OFFER

AUDITS/REVIEWS

TrickleUp can work with you to review a specific product or service, line of products or whole service ecosystem, and evaluate its social and environmental sustainability. We look at the full lifecycle of your offerings, survey comparisons and competitors in the market, and provide an overall sustainability score. This in-depth audit includes commentary on strengths as well as recommendations on areas for improvement and implementable next steps for bringing your product/service to the cutting edge of sustainability.

STRATEGY

We can help you discover the opportunities that exist for creating new products and services and/or re-launching existing ones. Whether you are considering developing a line of sustainable products, looking at how a new service can attract a new customer demographic or devising an innovative business model for making your organization’s offerings financially sustainable, TrickleUp with work with you to develop a strategy for making your ideas a successful reality.

RESEARCH

TrickleUp can conduct research to uncover insights about your business. We can help you understand how customers actually use your products and services and discover opportunities to improve and expand upon your brand’s place their daily lives. Through observation and interviews, task analysis and testing, we will synthesize the information we glean and help you apply it to your short- and long-term planning.

PRODUCT DESIGN

We create new products and tweak existing ones. TrickleUp will work with you to develop a new product or a whole new line of business that embodies sustainable practices. We will look at your existing products and help you re-imagine them, creating a forward-thinking plan for their re-launch. From ideation to prototyping, we will work with your marketing and product development teams to bring the product to market.

SERVICE DESIGN

We also create new services and tweak existing ones. Whether it is a physical or digital service, we will examine the best modes for delivering the service and how to make it as effective, efficient and intuitive for the user as possible. We can discover ways to turn products into service offerings and expand services into product lines. From retail to manufacturing, food to the financial industry, we can work with you to evolve your service in a sustainable, innovative offering.

OUR PROCESS

When we start working with a client, there is no pre-set formula nor set budget. Each client is unique and thus the process, deliverables and budget will be determined by the clientʼs goals and how TrickleUp can best help achieve these goals.

We will create a project brief that frames the design objectives and lays out the desired final products. Everything in-between comes from the unique challenges of each project. We use every tool at our fingertips to uncover insights and create the best solutions. These steps provide the basic framework that allows TrickleUp to go as broad and as deep as necessary in order for us to develop truly innovative concepts for products and services that are socially, environmentally and financially sustainable.

Collecting

Here we survey the world in whatever way we can in order to get a 360-degree perspective of the client, their business and the context of the new product/service. We do this in many ways, including looking at trends, analyzing the competition, and conducting field interviews. Overall we observe, listen and glean.

Brainstorming

With a solid understanding of the landscape of the design challenge, we start brainstorming. Here we go broad; we think as expansively as possible about what this new product/service can be and what it can offer the world.

Evaluating / Researching

In this stage, we evaluate what we have learned so far and narrow down all the opportunities to the most innovative and feasible concepts until we reach the one or two ideas to push forward. Then we go deep, to research how to make these concepts successful, real world offerings that  not only thrive in the marketplace but also disrupt and change it for the better.

Cohesioning

We realize cohesioning isn’t a proper form of the word, but it best describes what we do in this phase. Here we gather and solidify the knowledge we have gained in a tangible form. Based on the design brief and objective we set forth with our clients, we produce any number of different deliverables. This might include an executive summary, research paper, overview of the new product’s function and positioning or a service’s structure and experience, a brand envisioning document or a business plan.

Prototyping

This is the fun part. With a firm direction in place, we create early stage and working prototypes for testing. From sketches to paper prototypes, wireframes to 3D printed prototypes, we test our concepts using as many tools as make sense. Then we continue to iterate, improving the design with each new version. The project scope and client’s needs will determine the level of evolution and refinement of the final prototypes.

Communicating

Communication with our clients happens throughout the design process. We see design as a collaboration that relies on insight, expertise and excitement from the client at every step. At this last stage, we formally share the results of the process. We find the best way to communicate the new product/services in the most dynamic way. From presentations, videos, posters, books to other less traditional modes, our goal is to demonstrate what the new product/service can do and the positive impact it can make in order to get buy-in from all of the stakeholders who can help make it a reality.