We are an award-winning industrial design firm serving the consumer, healthcare, and durable goods markets. Our comprehensive innovation process includes insights and ideation, brand and digital, and classic product design for start-ups, mid-sized, and Fortune 500 companies across the United States. Based in Chapel Hill, the Trig® product design consulting team can be found in Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Knoxville, and Los Angeles.
How a concept becomes a product in the marketplace is a difficult road to success that necessitates processes that continuously improve product development over time. We are Design Thinkers with an innate ability to manage risk through multiple small experiments. We are explorers of new technologies and techniques, constantly testing the effectiveness of our discoveries through creative use of prototypes, then building out methodologies to consistently extract value from validated prototypes.
Difficult shouldn’t be scary. There’s comfort in process, and we strive to be the guides who help you explore the high seas of product development.
Our core values drive every project, every request, and every interaction with our clients. We established a simple set of core values—inspiration, collaboration, pragmatism, and integrity—that would help us not only establish a stout reputation, but give us something to live up to with every client engagement.
Just as our business has evolved, both internally with our number of contributors and externally with the number of customers we serve, the values that drive us should also evolve.
Our new set of core values—developed in collaboration by our entire team—reflects a company that doesn’t just aspire to survival, but to greatness. Relative to our goal of building a 100-year company, we are still very young. With this youth comes the opportunity to reflect on the harder challenges, learn from our victories, mistakes, and grow into a greater version of ourselves 10, 20, or 50 years down the road.
Hold the Line is an expression of protecting each team member's reputation and quality of work, which, in turn, protects the overall quality of work that clients expect and deserve from Trig. When we Hold the Line, it means anyone can challenge the quality of our work in the spirit of making it the best it can be. We know that having a fresh set of eyes means much more than proofreading, as often a new concept or value proposition is another person’s viewpoint away.
Often with our work, divergent perspectives are expressed, and we must focus our creativity to reach client goals. We aren’t creatives for creativity’s sake. We are in business to make other businesses better. We do that by striving for efficiency and treating every budget as if we had hired ourselves with our own money.Divergent thinking is essential to innovation, but it has to be balanced by pragmatism. We always strive to deliver effective and complete solutions to our clients with the greatest efficiency.
Every project matters. This dynamic isn’t simply exemplified by delivering great work - it requires going the extra mile, and going there before our clients do. In the fast pace of modern business, companies need partners who will stay one or two steps ahead, surveying the horizon for indicators of change and fresh perspectives, while listening intently to clients and their customers. This hunger, vigilance, desire to be the best, forges our pride in providing exceptional service.
Any company that combines the diverse disciplines of innovation, design, and marketing must evoke the tinkerer’s mindset. We must push as hard as we can against the creative constraints of business to deliver results that are thoughtful, game-changing, and solving real problems. No matter how large or small, each project offers an opportunity to explore our curiosity for a product or sector, allowing us to expand our minds to reach the best solutions, one step at a time.
Every person matters. At Trig, we play the long game. We know that if we put mission ahead of people, we may achieve it, but as a result degrade the wellbeing of our team, clients, and community. Every decision we make puts people first, even if that means turning down a project. We are caring and thoughtful. We strive for work-life balance in an ego-free, team-based environment that supports health, happiness, and self-actualization across an amazing career path. Our focus is on projects and clients sharing this value to make the world a better place. We are committed to a philanthropic mission of community engagement, sharing best practices of design to students of all ages.
We drive creative performance using a variety of strategic frameworks to propel innovation across multiple industries. We’re nerdy about bringing your next idea to life, relishing the adventure of new territory to explore together with our clients. We’re proud of all of our multi-disciplinary designers!
Our commitment to virtual collaboration tools didn't happen overnight. Trig’s history is built on providing the greatest value to our clients while attracting the best talent in the world. Trig is a values-based organization. In a fully digital environment, culture has to be intentional as we build deep relationships based on consistency and trust, both internally and with clients.
A typical facilitated brainstorming session is on site. Many clients have multiple sites, and resort to flying in team members from around the country or world for 8-12 hours of structured creative exercises. By hour 3, the biggest task of the facilitator is distraction management and pushing creativity out of exhausted participants.
Trig’s digital methods break up ideation sessions into smaller blocks of time, maximizing creative performance and saving companies the expense of travel and lodging. An 8-hour session can be split up over several shorter sessions with time and tools in-between to capture ideas as they bubble up from the subconscious and quiet moments of reflection.
Physical ideation spaces are filled with charts, posters, and endless sticky notes that quickly degrade once the event is over. All of that creative thinking is then interpreted as an unfortunate team member is tasked with collecting the scattered ideas into a binder.
Digitized ideation, by contrast, has participants natively working in the cloud. The whiteboard and sticky notes are memorialized as they happened, able to be referenced to determine inventorship, or to pick back up where you left off years ago.
Great talent is hard to come by. Mere geography isn't a limiting factor to digital collaboration. We have found that intrinsically motivated self-starters who are comfortable with the ambiguity of the creative process tend to thrive at Trig.
The most talented people in the world live anywhere in the world. They are introverts, extroverts, and ambiverts. The best creative teams have a healthy tension among people who look at problems from divergent perspectives and have unique life experiences. You can find our team working in Charlotte, Raleigh, and Richmond, Virginia. You can find them working in their homes, in shared office spaces, and on site with clients.
Digital tools give Trig the ability to hire and retain the most innovative design thinkers, giving them the opportunity to live where they want to live, travel the world, and work in the environment they feel most creative.
We are explorers and we don't believe in boxing ourselves in. Our unrestricted workspace allows us to explore every creative trail, every possible path to greatness in a project, and affords us the opportunity to always be on the lookout for the next best thing.
Being digital does not mean that we work everywhere, all the time. Peak creative performance means that we find time to rest, recharge, and keep our personal lives in balance with our professional efforts. Apart from our weekly community rituals of coming together, we have the freedom to manage our own time to deliver both happy clients and personal fulfillment.
We regularly invest in new digital collaboration tools and freely share what works (and doesn't) with our community. The future is here, but it is unevenly distributed. We have a "raise all ships" mindset and we accomplish far more when we create collaboratively.
