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Lovevery Creates Child’s Play and Adult Work - With a Purpose
With the help of: TechHelp
About
The Challenge
As Lovevery grew, the company attracted a cadre of highly qualified employees who were inspired to represent the brand in a meaningful way. Founder Jessica Rolph and business partner Rod Morris anticipated that the rapidly growing company would need access to top talent, expertise, and tools to innovate and meet market demand. To maintain its rapid market expansion, the company needed to quickly create new products, features, and functionality and regularly expand its product line. Company leaders realized the only way to create and innovate quickly would be to increase Lovevery’s design and prototyping capabilities.
Product development talent that fits with Lovevery’s culture has been critical to maintaining our company's rapid growth. The student and professional talent we have found at TechHelp’s NPD Lab has been essential for maintaining our trajectory.
MEP's Role
Early on, Lovevery hired Jake Fouts to lead product engineering. Fouts is a talented alumnus of the TechHelp New Product Development (NPD) Team at Boise State. After graduating in 2007 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering (ME), Fouts built his career in various entrepreneurial ventures and larger engineering and manufacturing companies where he gained expertise in consumer products for children.
Fouts augmented Lovevery’s talent pool by reaching back to TechHelp, a member of the MEP National Network™. Fouts worked with TechHelp to embed NPD student employees at Lovevery to directly support its design team and support Lovevery’s design and prototyping capacity gap.
Fouts also added NPD Specialist Blaise Lawless to the extended team. As a talented artist, industrial designer, prototype technician, and model maker, Lawless brought a much needed artistic eye to the table. Lawless became such an essential resource that Lovery hired him in 2019 to directly support product development and innovation. Working with TechHelp’s NPD Team at Boise State gave Lovevery opportunities to build their team with lower risk.
The combined Lovevery and TechHelp team recently collaborated in a highly coordinated way to design, develop, and deploy a new product line across multiple product families. This new solution supported the company’s strategy to enhance the customer experience in ways that current products could not. The combination of ongoing product innovation and contributions from key research and development staff resulted in significant investments that led to new sales.